Obesity more threatening than eating disorders

I just finished reading Ms. Rao’s… Obesity more threatening than eating disorders

I just finished reading Ms. Rao’s column from Wednesday’s Pitt News and have more than a few problems with it. What people don’t understand about eating disorders is that anorexia is not killing more than 1,000 Americans each day, but obesity is. I’m tired of hearing these sob stories from women as though the media is the problem for the one in 100 women (according to the column) that has an eating disorder. The fact is, according to Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, the director of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, “Obesity should be taken as seriously as any other health problem we currently have.”

More important than AIDS or cancer you ask? Not only does obesity kill more people than both of those in the form of heart disease and diabetes, it also kills more people than tobacco use each year, costing our health care system $100 billion annually. Pat Hare, who is the director of nutrition at All Children’s Hospital, says that obesity is the No. 1 public health concern that our population is going through on all levels – hard to argue considering it kills more people than anything else. So please, before you print another sob story about how one in 100 young ladies isn’t eating enough because of Britney Spears, print a story on the real facts – this country is as fat as ever and no one knows or cares about it because in part because publications such as yours refuse to ever talk about it.

Curtis A. Szalkuski

Public administration

CGS, class of 2002

Vegan definition too narrow

I would like to provide a more accurate explanation of the vegan lifestyle than the one provided by Todd Morris in his column “Where to report vegan lawbreakers?” Mr. Morris led readers to believe that all vegans must follow word-for-word the definition of the term “vegan” provided on Vegan.com, lest they be hypocrites. What he did not learn while conducting his less-than-thorough research, however, is that people may be vegan for a variety of reasons and, therefore, not all vegans adhere to a single doctrine. Some vegans such as myself choose to abstain from eating animals or their byproducts to protest the caloric inefficiency of feeding dozens of pounds of grain to livestock to produce 1 pound of meat to feed the rich while the grain could be better spent feeding a starving child in a third world country. In this sense, I would not be a hypocrite if I smoked, because tobacco is not a food crop and smoking it does not divert the resource from anyone in need.

It would be quite an undertaking to find a vegan that perfectly fit the definition Vegan.com provides. This “true vegan” must never have owned a car, ridden a bus, or even used electricity, because, in the end, these things are all disrespectful to the earth and its creatures. We simply try, each in our own way, to modify our diets and lifestyles to show respect for life while residing in a modern industrial society that inevitably doesn’t. Please do not attempt to discredit our efforts as dilettantism just because our ultimate goals may never be realized in this lifetime.

Kate Fox

Junior

Anthropology