JuniperFalls
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 9, 2018
[Biology nerd post]
Speaking of Virgie Tovar, and extreme fats having the same silhouettes as pudgy babies: a sane person, as opposed to a HAES/fat activist, will tell you that, while healthy-weight babies and toddlers do indeed have higher levels of body fat than healthy-weight adults (excluding pregnant women), it's mostly a different type of fat: "brown fat" vs. "white fat." (Humans might also have varying amounts of belly fat, visceral fat and subcutaneous fat. Belly and visceral fat are the problematic types from a health perspective.)
"Baby fat" is mostly brown fat, while the fat smothering the organs of morbidly obese people is visceral white fat. Adults in general have much less brown fat than white -- though lean adults tend to have a higher percentage of brown to white fat, than do fat adults. Brown fat helps keep you warm (in addition to human babies, you'll also find a lot of it in mammals that hibernate in winter), and regarding how it affects your hormones and similar things, brown fat actually behaves more like "muscle" than like "fat." This also explains why toddler-fat bodies are healthy and necessary for the toddlers, but very unhealthy for an adult who is fat enough to have a toddlerish or babyish silhouette. In fact, using brown fat actually burns white fat, in a way very similar to how using your muscles will also burn white fat.
White fat, meanwhile, has other functions in the body (and please, do NOT think white fat is bad! Some amount of white body fat is vital for all human beings; what is bad is having TOO MUCH white fat, especially to the degree the fat activists have): it stores energy for times when you don't eat enough, and if you have normal healthy levels of white fat, it also produces hormones which helps you process insulin more easily (but if you are too fat, this hormone production screws up, which affects your insulin resistance, which sets you up for many of the health problems plaguing obese people).
So what does all this have to do with Virgie? Back in September, Teen Vogue published an insane article called "Baby Fat Isn't Real, It's Just a Fatphobic Myth," and Virgie was one of the so-called experts they quoted (I went ahead and added the lunacy symbols to save everyone else the trouble):
“When we start policing children around food and telling them they’ll get big if they eat too much, we start the concept of ‘too much food equals a fat person’ and that’s a false equivalency,” says Virgie Tovar, a fat activist and author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat.
The term baby fat is, at its core, an oxymoron. American culture views childhood, especially infancy, as the pinnacle of innocence. Fatness is the absence of morality. Babies don’t have choice. But, as the belief goes, fat people choose to be fat, every day, by what they put in their mouth and how they move their bodies.
“Fat is always considered a state of lack of innocence,” Tovar says. “We believe that fat people have lost their moral compass.”
Literal baby fat, however, is both very real and mythological. Infants, like hibernating mammals, boast high levels of brown adipose tissue or "brown fat" that helps keep them warm. So, yes, babies have fat. But it’s just fat, there’s nothing particularly infant-like about it. The mythological part comes when we draw a distinction between so-called baby fat and other types of fat, seemingly saying that there is good and bad fat: the fat that happens to us as a baby is good, but the fat that we acquire as an adult, not so much. According to Dr. Jennifer Gaudiani, M.D., author of Sick Enough and an internist who specializes in eating disorders, making an allowance for baby fat at the expense of denigrating adult fat is an equation where no one wins.
“When people say baby fat, which has no scientific basis in reality, they’re suggesting that someone is allowed to be fat at a certain age with the unspoken addition that they will be expected not to be fat after that,” she said in an interview. Ask Dr. Gaudiani about fat and she rattles off a list of positive adjectives: natural, healthy, wonderful. “When we honor body diversity, we understand that people wear their fat in different ways and all of that has the potential to be compatible with health.
Baby fat, then, according to Tovar becomes a “safe” kind of fat and adult fat becomes dangerous, even demonized.....
Tl:dr: Although even fat activists have to admit brown fat is real, and objectively different from white fat, they also say crazy shit like "baby fat" has "no scientific basis in reality," and Virgie also insists it's a "false equivalency" to think "too much food equals a fat person."
Last edited:
