from:  Rodrick Wallace <[log in to unmask]>

The current issue of the journal Science focuses on the US obesity epidemic
from a characteristically decontextualized perspective: people get fat
because they eat too much and exercise too little.  The current issue of
Complexity Digest, available at

http://www.comdig.org

counterpoints our recent paper against the Old Boy Net perspective:

'FAT PEOPLE AND BOMBS':HPA AXIS COGNITION, STRUCTURED STRESS, AND THE US
OBESITY EPIDEMIC

ABSTRACT: We examine the accelerating 'obesity epidemic' in the US from the
perspective of recently developed  theory relating a
cognitive  hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis to an embedding 'language'
of structured psychosocial stress. Using a Rate Distortion argument, the
obesity epidemic is found to represent the literal writing of an image of a
ratcheting pathological social hierarchy onto the bodies of American adults
and children. This process, while stratified by the usual divisions of
class and ethnicity, is nonetheless relentlessly engulfing even affluent
majority populations. Our perspective places the common  explanation that
'obesity occurs when people eat too much and get too little exercise' in
the same category as the remark by US President Calvin Coolidge on the eve
of the Great Depression that 'unemployment occurs when large numbers of
people are out of work'.  Both statements ignore profound structural
determinants of great population suffering which must be addressed by
collective actions of equally great reform.

The paper is available directly at

http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00002745/

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