"Tall people are afflicted with tallness in exactly the same way fat people are afflicted with fatness." I was wondering if you could elaborate on this. Obviously height is not something that can be willingly changed in the same way that weight is, so can you explain further what you mean here? Just the fact that they are each bodily characteristics? Thanks!

Asked by

soarry

Read this.

Then remember that 95% of diets fail in the long-run, and the only way to make someone very fat become not-fat is, currently, surgery — just like the only way to change someone’s adult height (apart from normal adult changes like losing height with age) is surgery.

Height is also changeable in that children who are subject to poor nutrition can be stunted, or those who have better nutrition will have a tendency to have be taller, on average, than their parents. There is every indication that weight works the same way. It’s nearly as heritable as height, and children who are subject to famine in childhood can have stunted weights (and usually heights).

It’s true that prolonged starvation can bring extreme weight loss, but this is not sustainable. Remember, weight has a built-in flexibility around a central point so that humans can survive famine states (which are fairly common for the species). Height isn’t part of the metabolic system the way weight is. They are different systems, but they exhibit much of the same heritability and long-term changeability, and thus looking at them as expressions of human diversity — like skin and hair color — is valid.

Additionally, note that hair color, for instance, is very cosmetically changeable, and also has a tendency to go grey with age. Does that mean hair color isn’t an expression of human variation? And if we correlate hair color with various diseases — which isn’t hard to do if you conduct some simple regressions — does that mean we should consider people who have a hair color correlated with the most conditions as diseased?

We see a large variation in weights in the population, and weight is highly heritable. Thus, weight, though subject to short-tern variability (which isn’t present in height) and generational variability (which is present in height) is an expression of human diversity. It is not a disease.

-ArteToLife