Today in Evil Fatties

Shaker Angie sends this article from the New York Times about Dr. Delos M. Cosgrove, a heart surgeon who is the chief executive of the Cleveland Clinic, who says he wishes he could stop hiring obese people, because "We should declare obesity a disease and say we're going to help you get over it."

Um, okay. But, like, even if that were true, does that mean this heart surgeon wouldn't hire a thin person with heart disease? Or diabetes? Or lupus? Or any one of a million other diseases?

It's funny (where funny = total bullshit) how even the people who call obesity a disease treat it differently than any other disease. It's like a whole new kind of disease, where the most important sufferers are not the people with the actual disease, but the people who don't have it.

They particularly suffer in their pocketbooks and in their eyes. Oh, the humanity!

And Paul the Spud (via Sadly, No!) and Shaker Unree (via Opinion L.A.) pass along this Wall Street Journal op-ed by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who helpfully explains that "many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices."

Which is totally not an advertisement for shopping at Whole Foods, he swears it! No, wait, I'm sorry—he doesn't actually deny that at all; what I meant to say is that he's full of shit, because he doesn't put his fancypants grocery stores in the places that most need them, the sorts of places where the "healthy lifestyle choices" he wants people to make don't exist, nor does the price what he's selling so that those "healthy lifestyle choices" are not just another luxury item outwith the reach of the lower classes.

Since I don't shop at Whole Foods, maybe someone who does can tell me if they sell organic hay for the high horses from which assholes like Mackey issue their intolerable blame, shame, and naked hatred.

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