Sugar Too?! Ugh… Anyway, Look: It’s Not That Important To Be Super-Duper Vegan

Just a quick one for everybody. I just found out what a “sugar vegan” is. This is someone who abstains from eating processed and clarified white sugar because it is filtered using a form of carbon derived from charred animal bones. I think it’s important to be wary of all these little ways the meat industries insert themselves into our lives, but in my opinion we should be cautious about striving to achieve personal purity. I try to eat vegan when I can, but I usually rely on a mostly pescatarian diet. There are still efforts I want to make to eat more vegan, but I am happy with the success I’ve made so far at least when it comes to beef and pork. On occasion, if some beef is offered to me, I will eat it. I never buy it. But I understand that my own shopping choices hardly make a dent in consumer demand for factory-farmed animals and their products. I’ll avoid white sugar if I can (for this and other reasons). But it’s critical that many people are encouraged to make a switch toward a more vegetable-rich diet and refrain from the ritualized daily incorporation of meat-eating. It’s far less helpful for me to personally expunge every trace of animal by-product from my diet. It’s just another example of personal responsibility propaganda that makes us feel better but achieves very little.

Oh! By the way, it seems that organic sugar and less-processed sugars like turbinado and panela are exempt from this. But not BROWN SUGAR! It’s white sugar with molasses added back in. PHEW. Okay, I’m done now.

Bye.

Questions The Internet Will Not Give Me An Answer To

Why is it in virtually every “after” photo or video I’ve seen of males on the internet or TV commercial involve becoming more muscular and not simply being less fat? I feel like it’s sometimes true that women’s after pics show “toned” figures, but that for men it’s a given that they have to have visible muscle definition and laud their dedication to fitness regimens. Why?

Being Fat Means… What, Exactly?

This post is inspired by Virgie Tovar’s No I Won’t Cut You A Smaller Slice of Cake.

People look for rational ways to justify their prejudice toward being fat and certain forms of consumption, noting how being too fat and eating too many processed foods can negatively affect your physical health and your cognition (which suggests a rationale for the belief that fat people have poor moral character). But there’s ample evidence that fat affects everyone differently depending on where they store it and how much they have. Many of the “negative” psychological traits associated with eating a Western diet are due to the emotional and psychosocial consequences of fat discrimination, which takes the form of ridicule, food policing, social exclusion, lack of physical accommodation, and poor media representation. To a great extent, fat prejudice is arbitrary. Signals of body fat and signals of eating habits are symbols; they are a form of social compliance. Keeping to a specific window of body fat and eating certain foods are ways to indicate you’re part of the group. The opposite may as well be the norm – and in fact, in some cultures it is. Not being fat or not eating large quantities of food… these things can make you look untrustworthy, unreliable, and ungrateful. Also, it’s important to keep in mind that fat prejudice is often code for racism and sexism. From what I’ve read, bodies that are non-White or non-male may be more comfortable with fatter bodies and larger portion sizes, and so stigmatizing those bodies and behaviors is a subversive way to discriminate against these groups.

The Consequences of Negative Fat Representation

When I was doing research on the presence of fat cartoon characters on television, I came upon a few news articles that discussed a 2015 study out of the University of Colorado. The articles warn about the study’s findings that kids who see cartoon characters with a “rounder” shape are more likely to make unhealthy food choices afterward, unless they are first reminded about healthy behaviors. I immediately became worried about an implication that fat characters had ought to NOT be visible on TV, so as to not prime kids into eating poorly. I think it is very important to have better fat representation in the media, especially for kids. The researchers wrote that there is already evidence that children form negative stereotypes about fat people by the age of 3, and by 8 years old they think fat people are “lazy” and “less healthy”.

I think it’s not completely clear that seeing fat stereotypes “cause” kids to eat more or eat unhealthily, or if it’s really that seeing fat characters LETS them NOT police their own eating. From what I’ve read in the study itself there is no mention of this possibility, but I think it’s important. Because in a way I think that’s not a bad thing, and if anything, what might contribute to a “letting loose” mentality is the constant admonishment for eating “bad” foods that kids are exposed to. Researchers have found that part of the reason diets don’t work for most people is that denying yourself foods you think are bad for you makes you crave them even more. So I think we should hold off on blaming depictions of fat characters indulging themselves.

I hope that people don’t refrain from portraying positive and diverse fat characters in the media because A) the only reason kids and adults hold negative stereotypes about fat people is because the media historically shows fat people as overindulgent, lazy, fearful, etc. and B) you’re NOT going to get kids to make more healthy food choices by erasing fat people from the media; they’ll just think only thin people eat healthy and that there’s no place for fat people who eat healthy, that both these things can’t be true simultaneously.