One of the things about this country's health care that I find irritating is the vast focus on weight control, as if it were the only thing that can be changed, and as if a person's health were predicated solely on that. It's a very convenient way of putting most, if not all, of the blame on the patient, which is of course very good for the insurance-based system. If the cultural view is that fat is the patient's fault, and we manage to connect pretty much all bad health with weight, then presto! The insurance companies can deny all kinds of things because they're caused by the patient's negligence, and not by anything THEY say they're responsible for. Nope, it's too easy.

Weight is PART of people's health, and I'm sorry, I don't believe it's a major part. Stress is far more important. Lack of sleep is WAY more important, but we've been successfully brainwashed by American culture to believe it doesn't really count as a factor, when it may be the BIGGEST factor affecting our health. (You can thank Eternal Asshole Henry Ford for that cute little development, him and his "I sleep four hours a night why don't YOU" lying horseshit.) Quality of food is far more important - when the quality is better, people tend to eat less whether they hanker for it or not. The human body can deal with quite a lot, but it has to have the right conditions to do so, and we do not live in the right conditions at ALL.

We've been bamboozled into believing that the system we have is the only possible one, that if WE would just buck up and do what we have to, it would all work just fine. It's just bootstrap bullshit that's gotten us into the mess we're in with health care, and it's never made any sense to me. Weight has become the Winged Victory Of Samothrace in the health-care industry, the thing that the pickpockets point to, to get us to "look over there!" while they rifle our wallets. It's about time we stopped obsessing on this one aspect of health and start paying attention to the whole enchilada.