The Health Institute of Nutrition

Recently, many in the embattled anti-fat community have felt their oppression rights particularly oppressed by the findings coming from a Dutch study on the true cost of obesity. This study suggests, using little more than logic and mathematics, that as obese people are likely to die younger and faster than thin people, they end up saving our health systems money.

At first blush, this seems pretty ironclad. After all, everybody knows that obese people are more likely to die than thin people, period. According to that criterion, this study’s conclusion would seem to be a good fact.

For the two other “good fact” criteria, however, things get a little bit murkier. It is definitely fair that fat people die sooner than thin people, but it is not fair for a thin and obviously healthy person to cost the system more in healthcare over the cost of his thin lifetime.

Most importantly, it is not convenient. If fat people don’t cost the system more, that imperils the ability of everybody from politicians to insurers to the little (i.e., thin) guy on the street to make sweeping claims. It calls into question our God-given right—enshrined, we’re fairly certain, somewhere in the Constitution*—to yell at fat people about how much they’re costing us in taxes and health insurance premiums. This in turn limits our ability to dictate how they must live their lives.

These findings, in short, constitute a very, very bad fact, indeed.

So how are we to interpret this flawed study, then? Is there nothing useful to take away from it? As it happens, it does contain some invaluable insight for our modern society, if we recall another recent study which determined that “body image” had a more direct effect on mortality than body size.

You see, fat people who are die early are the ones with a fitting lack of self-esteem. The ones who stubbornly insist on loving themselves just the way they are may live longer, using up money and valuable resources in their old age that would otherwise be available for treating more deserving thin patients.

Thus, the best fact we can draw from this study can be expressed as this:

Fat people who feel good about themselves cost the health care system billions of dollars.

Remember that, the next time you feel like not pointing out a fat person’s obvious shortcomings. When fat people die an early death, everybody wins.

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*We think it might be somewhere near the part about interstate commerce.

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Follow-Up

In a closer examination of the study, the Institute discovered some serious and obvious problems with its methodology.

First, it is important to understand that the Dutch live in Denmark or some place, which is not even part of America.

Second, it must be realized that Denmark, also known as “The Lesser Antilles”, uses the metric system of measurement. The metric system is as un-scienterrific a system of measurement as has ever been devised. Whereas reputable scienterrific researchification institutes such as THIN use “pounds” to measure weight, the metric system uses “grams”.

The “gram”, it transpires, is not actually a unit of weight but is instead a unit of mass. Scienterrifically speaking, the difference between the two is as simple as it is profound: large amounts of weight are bad and everybody knows it. The same cannot yet be said for mass. You might well wonder why we as a society have spent years assigning moral values to the property of weight if so-called “Dutch scientists” aren’t even going to bother to measure it.