Self-styled anti-obesity crusader MeMe Roth told Neal Cavuto that 17-year-old Jordin Sparks didn't deserve to win American Idol because of her weight. [Watch.]
Who is this delusional scold, and how did she she get on TV?
Google tells me that MeMe Roth is the founder of a group called National Action Against Obesity.
She also has a blog called Wedding Gown Challenge on which she exhorts people to maintain their college weight throughout their lives. That's not necessarily such bad advice for people who a relatively healthy lifestyle in college. It seems more reasonable to use each individual's lowest stable adult weight to estimate that person's ideal weight, as opposed to some arbitrary height-weight ratio.
However, Roth doesn't seem prepared to apply that standard when she can elevate her public profile at the expense of a healthy-looking 17-year-old girl like Jordin.
According to NAAO's website, the group has trademarked the term "Secondhand Obesity™" to denote 'obesity handed down from one generation to the next, as well as from citizen to citizen.'
That's right: MeMe Roth's group asserts that obesity is a communicable condition. Hence Roth's willingness to berate Sparks, I suppose. According to Roth's crackpot theory, Jordin is a vector for fatness. A veritable typhoid Mary, scarcely afflicted herself, but suppressing national leptin levels over the airwaves.
Notice how this "Secondhand Obesity" metaphor frames weight as a matter of personal culpability. I agree that bad environments predispose people to be sedentary and badly nourished.
However, the NAAO's concept of secondhand obesity makes it sound like obese people themselves are endangering others, as opposed to the modern living conditions that make everyone less healthy and some people fat.
The NAAO is trying to make it sound like parenting or performing with a few extra pounds is akin to chain smoking in a daycare center.
Because nothing fights obesity like berating healthy people until they stay very quiet and still. Good thinking, MeMe!
Roth was nearly arrested for attempting to confiscate confiscate sprinkles and other goodies from a Pennsylvania YMCA. She decided that the folks at the fitness center were too fat:
Roth cites an overrepresentation of obesity among employees and volunteers, including the Philadelphia Area Spring Valley YMCA in Limerick, PA where she had come to exercise Tuesday. She assumes the membership falls closely in line to the U.S.'s national obesity figures: two-thirds of adults overweight -- one-third of children overweight. The YMCA recently completed its own version of The Biggest Loser. [PRnewsnow]
Roth also engineered a boycott of the women's magazine Redbook in retaliation for a March cover story entitled "We Love Your Body From Size 2 to 20."
What drives MeMe? She says that Eddie Van Halen made her promise never to get fat.
HT: Zuzu.
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