Your Survival Blog
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Preparedness: a weighty issue?
I recently blitzed through Amanda Ripley’s very readable The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes — and Why. It’s an excellent book, but I stopped cold while reading the appendix called “How to Boost Your Survival Odds.” You see, one of Ripley’s six survival tips is “Lose Weight”:
I hate to nag, but there is no workaround here. The harsh truth is that obese people move more slowly, are more vulnerable to secondary injuries such as heart attacks, and have a harder time physically recovering from any injuries they do sustain. There is no need to say much more, since there are entire industries devoted to this particularly modern and maddening challenge. But it’s worth remembering that on 9/11, people with low physical ability were three times as likely to be hurt while evacuating the towers. Once again, what helps us in regular life helps us in disasters.
I’ve heard enough from friends with weight issues that this passage immediately struck me as wrongheaded. So I ran it by a few of them to check.
I can’t improve much on their comments:
“When someone claims to be putting forth a ‘harsh truth’, I automatically expect them to be putting forth a prejudice they hope to not be called upon to justify by announcing in advance that it is the truth. I’ll just run right out and tell all the obese people I know who are runners, dancers, choreographers, and rock climbers that they should really try to develop some physical ability, shall I?”
“While there are correlations with weight, it’s not a 1:1 mapping, and in an emergency it doesn’t matter why someone has trouble moving (other than to let the survivors feel better or worse about whatever happens to them). Nor do I think that lowering one’s prospects of dying in a rare disaster is likely to be a particularly powerful motivator for anyone inclined to be overweight.”
“‘Get in better shape’, where practical, is generically good advice. But then, so is ‘make ten million dollars’, which would make any number of disaster preparation steps easier.”
“I get the impression that there’s a widely-held sense among those without the inclination — or with the sort of low-level, need-to-lose-five-pounds issue that can be dealt with with minimal lifestyle changes — that the problem is somehow that overweight people didn’t realize there were any disadvantages to being fat, or that it had anything to do with what they ate or, to a lesser extent, how much activity they engaged in. Ripley may be in a similar position: ‘But if they knew they’d be more likely to be burned alive by Al Qaeda, maybe then they’d stop their incomprehensible eating and activity habits.’ There are really very few obese people who couldn’t name ten reasons they’d rather be thinner. Increasing social stigma and the wide trumpeting of health risks are demonstrably no match for the wide availability of cheap, tasty food; I seriously doubt that adding another, fairly uncommon risk to the list is likely to make a significant difference.”
“As an overweight person, I think that the biggest issue here is the conflation of obesity and ‘low physical ability’. There are plenty of people out there who are clinically overweight, who nonetheless have very good strength, agility and endurance, if not speed. I would seriously question if Ripley has any hard data to back up her blanket comments about obese people healing more slowly, or being at higher risk for heart attack in a disaster. Just to put things into perspective, while I’m way heavier than I should be now, I also know that I was 30+ pounds outside the ‘overweight’ categorization for my height when I was playing on the varsity soccer team in high school. There’s a definite undercurrent of ‘thinner is better’ out there in the world, I just don’t buy it, and frankly there’s a lot of medical data turning up that flies in the face of straight BMI statistics.”
One friend referred to the “elephant in the room”: “if you are somehow differently-abled and disaster strikes, by Ripley’s guidelines, you are f***ed.” He agreed with me that “the right place to focus might be on maximizing overall fitness and mobility for the person you are, rather than on reducing BMI.”
“Yeah,” responded another friend, “talk about mobility and maybe about helps for disabled people who need to evacuate when the elevators go out. And maybe nudge all of us to improve our mobility the best we can.”
I’m with them. What do you think?
Posted by eks on 05/27 at 10:27 PM(8) Comments • Permalink