Why Intermittent Fasting Isn’t Effective or Healthy
I married into an family of Southern Italians who moved to the United States and like quite a few cultural groups (such as Pacific Islanders) for whom the Standard American Diet is death on a plate.<p>I went to a family party a while back and the biggest topic of conversation was that many people had been diagnosed with Type II diabetes.  I was asked if I had it and I wasn&#x27;t ready to confess that I&#x27;d just gotten a 6.7 A1C myself.  (I lost about 8% of my body mass and haven&#x27;t read above 5.8 since)<p>The rest of us are dying from diabesity,  but the the media runs a constant drumbeat about anorexia because they people in the media aren&#x27;t representative of the cultural diversity of the country.  My Italian relatives aren&#x27;t newspaper reporters, magazine writers, or professors.<p>Some ethnic groups disproportionately go into the jobs that tell stories for the rest of us,  so the stories that we&#x27;re told are about their problems,  not about our problems.<p>On top of that,  people who work in the storytelling industries tend to be self-centered.  In a working class family,  troubled daughters smoke cigarettes,  get pregnant,  etc.  In a storytelling class family,  anorexia initially looks like the kind of &quot;self development&quot; that the storytelling class prizes -- it takes a while to see the self destruction it entails...  So it&#x27;s a way a person in that situation can &quot;create a crisis&quot; that their family can relate to.<p>Also I think storytelling class families are more vulnerable to media images because their own members write the text that goes next to those images.  Ordinary people have some protection from images of Olga Sherer and Kim Noorda because they know these images are illusions that are sent out from New York and Los Angeles.<p>Those images wash over the rest of us and are automatically discounted in our minds because we know they come from &quot;another world&quot;.  If your mom or dad has the byline for the article that occurs next to the model and you just might get invited to a party where these people appear,  you don&#x27;t have the cultural protections that you get just from growing up in Iowa, Alabama, etc.<p>This movie<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Seven_Year_Itch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Seven_Year_Itch</a><p>is about encounters between a middle-aged book publisher and a young and beautiful model that might at first seem as improbable as a Japanese harem anime,  but it&#x27;s not an improbable match if you see the pair as coworkers in the same industry.  (You would live in the same apartment building and otherwise consort with people &quot;in your class&quot;)