Photograph: Melissa Maples

On the heels of Esquire's meat and chili-filled "Eat Like a Man" section comes this story by Zach Weisberg about how obese people face job discrimination, and how some companies are offering incentives for employees to slim down.

Practicing outright fat discrimination is deplorable no matter who you are, but this can be a particularly charged issue for men. Eating heartily is a classic trademark of being a "real man," a notion reinforced by TV Dinners, and fast-food joints like Hardee's (or Carl's Jr.) and Burger King. In order to be masculine, it seems you have to have the intestinal fortitude of a steel lumberjack, and must eat fatty food, such as burgers and wings. In order to get or keep a job, however, you're expected to stay fit and trim so you don't raise your company's health-insurance premiums.

While Esquire is asking why pushing people to be "healthier" (read: not be fat) is a bad thing, it simultaneously spends precious pages in its print edition on blatantly seductive shots of food and articles about steakhouses in Montana that serve giant slabs of beef on a plate. At least women's magazines are consistent enough to fill their pages with stick-thin models and make you feel bad about eating.

Welcome to the world of conflicting standards, boys.

—Rachael Oehring

Photograph by Plate of Wander

Australian scientists have recently discovered that humans can actually taste fat, and those who are more sensitive to its flavor tend to eat less of it, and have lower BMIs. This is different from the texture of fat in foods such as ice cream, which is associated with a richer mouth-feel. According to the scientists, all humans can taste fat in varying degrees, but some are more sensitive to it than others, just as with sweetness and saltiness. The scientists are trying to account for these sensitivities in fat flavor detection, which could lead to new ways to treat obesity.

Is this really news though? We all know what fat tastes like, and it tastes like butter, which is delicious to everyone.

—Rachael Oehring

The New York City Department of Health released the following commercial on YouTube, and it's one of the grossest things we've ever seen (and we see a lot). The print ads of human fat pouring out of bottles are nothing compared to this horrific display. Forget attempts to educate or encourage good behavior, no, the best solution is to just scare and gross people out.

The video »

The government's really sending really mixed messages: first they subsidize corn, making it so cheap we can gorge on high fructose corn syrup, then they charge us more for health insurance just because our organs have caramelized. Well I'm sorry, but our bodies our the only growth industry America has left. China may have 1.4 billion people, but I doubt they outweigh the combined residents of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Being overweight is as American as eating a whole apple pie. And we're the majority folks, 67% of the population is either overweight or obese, the scales are literally tipped in our favor.

He then brings on Amy Farrell, author of the book Fat Shame, to talk about the government's attempt to "socially engineer through legislation":

The video »

The people at the NYC Department of Health care so much about you and your fat ass that they want you to drink less sugary drinks. And since they can't seem to get the political will to get a "fat tax" on the drinks to push them out of everyone's reach, they're just going to scare people by grossing them out with these disgusting ads in the New York City subway system. Yes, that's human fat, all lumpy and veiny, pouring out of bottles of Gatorade, Snapple, and Coke.

"Just trying to be positive and encouraging doesn't always get people's attention," Associate Commissioner Geoff Cowley told the Daily News. "If you get in people's faces a bit, that does get people's attention." There must be a more effective way that doesn't give kids nightmares.

View larger »

Photo via thedartmouth.com

The smarty pants at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) in Lebanon, New Hampshire, have nixed fried foods in favor of healthier options for both staff and patients.

Neighboring West Lebanon Hospital resident John Hughes thinks the fried food ban is a good idea, stating, “People have been eating fried food for years, and they all end up dying of heart attacks.”

Keep reading »

Photo via thedongallery.blogspot.com

Portly Ronald McDonald sculptures by Ron English at The Don Gallery, Milan Italy. See more photos of the show at The Don Gallery's blog.

Up close and personal »

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet's Office of Highway Safety is introducing the giveaway as part of its "Click It or Ticket" campaign to combat the state's 73 percent seatbelt usage rate — near the bottom nationally.

And now the nation’s seventh fattest state has a reason to get even fatter.

To make the irony even more delicious: Obesity is actually linked to decreased seatbelt use.

— Cammie Nguyen

Here are some dark, funny, and brilliant parodies of Pepsi's "Refresh Everything" ad campaign by Brooklyn-based artist Trevor Bittinger. Sort of inevitable, really, but some of these are totally spot-on, in a culture-jamming Adbusters kind of way — particularly the one above that's refashioned into an ad for Coke. See the whole set over at Flickr.

We've chronicled parodies of Pepsi's ads before, from South Park's commercial to Lawrence Yang reimagining the Pepsi logo as a teetering, rotund man.

More more more »

Closeup of the original

The advertising for the Active Life Movement, an anti-obesity campaign from Austin-based design firm Latinworks warns parents to "Keep obesity away from your child," and reimagines childhood toys and heroes as being lazy and overweight: Superman, Playmobil Pirates, and Barbie. [via]

Keep reading »

Food during my early years was a very difficult issue for me. I grew up in an addictive family. My mother had serious problems with alcohol and prescription drugs. I was an overweight kid. I can remember back in those days there weren't the strategies that there are today to deal with those issues. So my parents put this very nasty cartoon of a very overweight young kid with a beanie cap and pasted it on the front of the refrigerator. So every time I opened the refrigerator I had to look at that picture.

Well, that's one way to deal with the obesity problem. But seriously, oh my god, that is terrible. We feel for the guy.

Responding to a piece in the Telegraph UK, Ricky Gervais defends his fat jokes on his blog (sorry, there's no permalink):

I heard someone on the radio once say that they were tired of the prejudice aimed at the overweight. They said something like "you're not allowed to make fun of gay people, so why are you allowed to make fun of fat people? It's the same thing."

It's not the same thing though, is it? Gay people are born that way. They didn't work at becoming gay. Fat people became fat because they would rather be that way than stop eating so much. They had to eat and eat to get fat. Then, when they were fat they had to keep up the eating to stay fat. For gayness to be the same as fatness, gay people would have to start off straight but then ween themselves onto cock. Soon they're noshing all day getting gayer and gayer. They've had more than enough cock... they're full... they're just sucking for the sake of it. Now they're overgay, and frowned upon by people who can have the occasional cock but not over indulge.

A video of Ricky Gervais' standup performance (2007) »

The News & Observer reports on a recent symposium at North Carolina State University dealing with overweight zoo animals:

Gorillas in the wild live on a bulky, low-calorie diet of such things as leaves, shoots and bark, but in zoos are often fed specially formulated biscuits.

The biscuits offer nutrition, but aren't bulky and don't fill up a peckish gorilla. That stresses out the primates and can lead to neurotic behavior. That also means that zoo gorillas -- who spend much of the day foraging in the wild -- have little to do, except sit around and look bored, the gorilla equivalent of hanging out on the sofa watching TV all day.

Jamie Oliver is, it turns out, so obsessed with keeping Brits slim that he actually cut up a corpse on a nationally-aired TV show back in January.

The video »

"If we leave it, it will be like America, where it is almost not worth it, because it's so ingrained."

..."I believe that radical change is quite easy," he told the cross-party committee.

"I have witnessed it across the country, across the classes. It is incredibly emotional to see the life of a family changed through nuggets of very small amounts of good information."

Mmm, nuggets.

Schools in the UK need to buy bigger desks and chairs because "children are getting too fat for furniture used in most classrooms." Led by former Cabinet minister Charles Clarke, the commission on the future of education called on schools to "refit classes with sturdier chairs and higher tables to curb a rise in the number of youngsters suffering bad backs."

The story gets better—former Cabinet minister Charles Clarke "himself has a rather portly stature despite recent weight loss and has been nicknamed 'two pizzas' for his generous appetite," The Daily mail reports.

You know, fuck it. Forget better nutrition, teaching healthy eating habits, and physical exercise. Just make the chairs fucking bigger. Or give em Wall-E hover chairs so they don't even have to walk. [via]