Salad Maker Denounced For Encouraging Weight Loss
09/03/2021
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From the Washington Post news section:

Sweetgreen CEO criticized after connecting the pandemic to unhealthy eating: ‘Incredibly fat-phobic’

By Jonathan Edwards
Yesterday at 7:43 a.m. EDT

Vaccines and masks won’t save us from the pandemic, Jonathan Neman wrote, but the Sweetgreen CEO has a solution: Outlaw junk food.

Neman, whose chain of 100-plus restaurants sells salads for $10 to $15 a pop, published a LinkedIn post Tuesday suggesting that obesity is the “root cause” of health problems — including severe coronavirus infections.

“[Seventy-eight percent] of hospitalizations due to COVID are Obese and Overweight people. Is there an underlying problem that perhaps we have not given enough attention to?” he wrote, appearing to cite March Centers for Disease Control and Prevention covid-19 hospitalization data.

Neman concluded that covid will be around for the foreseeable future and therefore people have to find a way to coexist with the virus.

“We cannot run away from it and no vaccine nor mask will save us (in full disclosure I am vaccinated and support others to get vaccinated),” the Georgetown University graduate wrote. “Our best bet is to learn how to best live with it and focus on overall health [vs.] preventing infection.”

Government officials, he added, should ban or tax unhealthy food.

“We clearly have no problem with government overreach on how we live our lives all in the name of ‘health,’” he wrote. “What if we made the food that is making us sick illegal? What if we taxed processed food and refined sugar to pay for the impact of the pandemic? What if we incentivized health?”

After his remarks were published, some commenters knocked Neman for fat-shaming people, Business Insider reported.

“Yikes, this is incredibly fat-phobic,” one person commented on his LinkedIn post. “Have you considered how our healthcare system systematically underserves people who are considered to be in those groups?”

Neman deleted the post after Vice reported on it Wednesday.

This kind of idea was pretty mainstream a dozen years ago back when NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg banned Big Gulp sugary drinks at fast food restaurants.

But now it seems kind of Anti-Diversity, although I’m not sure if the fat get a full Pokemon point.

That got me wondering how much of white women’s enthusiasm for the Racial Reckoning is motivated by the view of black women as the leading edge of Fat Liberation?

Blacks and whites are about the same height (with whites being a fraction of an inch taller on average according to the feds’ ongoing NHANES project of measuring Americans for the benefit of clothing retailers and manufacturers). Black and white men age 20-39 are about the same weight, but black women outweigh white women on average by 20 pounds.

So maybe a lot of white women are enthusiastic about black women being recently idealized as the epitome of beauty because they sense that if society comes to adore 190 pound black women that means they can ease off on the dieting themselves?

[Comment at Unz.com]

 

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