Reply #108: Ermm no

[dmallind]

Again you seem to think I am making a value judgment or that we should compare these two risks to see which is worse. That is irrelevant.

There is a reason why insurers actively offer smoking and non-smoking rates yet do so much less (NOT never)with obese and non-obese rates.

You seem to think I'm arguing that obesity carries no risk. That is not my point at all.

The difference is it is merely a risk factor. People can die of strokes, diabetes, heart attack etc and be scrawny rails all their lives. Heck Jim Fixx springs to mind of course. Am I more likely to have these than a person with my exact characteristics other than weight? Absolutely - my risk is higher.

BUT obesity causes no tissue damage - no direct attack on the body. There is nothing whatsoever damaging to health that happens to ALL overweight people. I don't know how I can express this more clearly. Smoking causes damage to tissues - period - every smoker - no exceptions. This is not the case with overweight people.

I'm not speaking at all of which is riskier or whether obesity increases risk. That's inarguable.

One other wrinkle in this is that there is a huge overlap in the conditions where obesity elevates risk and where smoking also does. Strokes. Heart attacks. Certain cancers.

The difference between risk and damage is not just sophistry. It is impossible to say if I drop dead tomorrow of a heart attack whether I would have done so had I not been overweight. It is statistically speaking true beyond question I am increasing my probability of one, but aggregate statistics do not necessarily imply discrete causation. While the same can be said of many smoking related diseases, what cannot be argued is the tissue damage smoking does. In other words it's MUCH easier to prove in individual cases that smoking causes damage than it is to prove in individual cases that weight caused a heart attack.

No value judgments, no comparisons on which is worse, no argument that one should face discrimination while the other doesn't is or has been implied. All my point is is that overweight status and smoking cannot be compared in a valid way in this instance. That makes neither of them fair game for firings and makes neither of them more or less damaging, merely different. That's all I'm trying to show.