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  #1   ^
Old Wed, Apr-04-12, 14:05
mike_d's Avatar
mike_d mike_d is offline
Grease is the word!
Posts: 8,475
 
Plan: PSMF/IF
Stats: 236/181/180 Male 72 inches
BF:disappearing!
Progress: 98%
Location: Alamo city, Texas
Default Is it OK to discriminate against obese people?

Quote:
Victoria Hospital in Texas has stated they will no longer hire anyone with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 35 or higher. To put that in perspective, that's 210 pounds for someone 5', 5".
This commentary surely brought the posters out of the woodwork!

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_...t-obese-people/
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  #2   ^
Old Wed, Apr-04-12, 15:07
bobiam bobiam is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 886
 
Plan: NANY
Stats: 503/405/175 Male 72 inches
BF:plenty :)
Progress: 30%
Location: Northern Illinois
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by mike_d
This commentary surely brought the posters out of the woodwork!

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_...t-obese-people/

is this any different than not hiring smokers?

or drug users?

or people with other undesirable behaviors?
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  #3   ^
Old Wed, Apr-04-12, 16:03
pinkclouds's Avatar
pinkclouds pinkclouds is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 6,164
 
Plan: Atkins-ish
Stats: 255/250/175 Female 65.5"
BF:Size 22/16-18/10
Progress: 6%
Location: Colorado
Default

Unfortunately, obesity (or weight) is not a protected class under Title VII. Unless the act of not hiring people beyond a certain BMI leads to some adverse impact against a protected class it is not considered illegal.

An example of adverse impact would be if restricting hiring to a certain BMI unintentionally creates discrimination against a specific group like hispanics, who may coincidentally be on the higher end of BMI charts.

Does that make sense?

Sorry, my HR brain is on.
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  #4   ^
Old Wed, Apr-04-12, 16:29
Kirsteen's Avatar
Kirsteen Kirsteen is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 3,819
 
Plan: Atkins
Stats: 217/145/143 Female 171cm
BF:
Progress: 97%
Default

Some people can be really healthy, even if they are overweight.. And what about people who are on medication which pushes up their weight, such as steroids? I do think this is discrimination.
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  #5   ^
Old Wed, Apr-04-12, 16:42
Seejay's Avatar
Seejay Seejay is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 3,025
 
Plan: Optimal Diet
Stats: 00/00/00 Female 62 inches
BF:
Progress: 8%
Default

I wonder if they had mass firings of their employees. We know how nurses and other stress shift workers fight the weight battle.
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  #6   ^
Old Wed, Apr-04-12, 16:53
OregonRose's Avatar
OregonRose OregonRose is offline
Wag more, bark less.
Posts: 692
 
Plan: Meat.
Stats: 216/149/145 Female 65.5 inches
BF:
Progress: 94%
Location: Eugene
Default

From the article:
Quote:
Now, for the record, with rare exceptions, if you are overweight it's because you eat too much and exercise too little. Decrease the calories and increase the exercise and you will lose weight.

Well, glad that's all settled.
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  #7   ^
Old Wed, Apr-04-12, 17:11
pinkclouds's Avatar
pinkclouds pinkclouds is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 6,164
 
Plan: Atkins-ish
Stats: 255/250/175 Female 65.5"
BF:Size 22/16-18/10
Progress: 6%
Location: Colorado
Default

I can see this opening up a monster can of worms...

For example: What if an employee gains weight after being hired? Are you then going to terminate them for exceeding a certain BMI?

And what if they have a medical condition that qualifies them for an accomodation under the ADA? Allowing them to stay employed could be considered a reasonable accomodation.

And... what if a majority of the applicants you turn down are females? then you have gender discrimination.

It may not be illegal, but it's a baaaaaad idea, in my opinion.
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  #8   ^
Old Wed, Apr-04-12, 17:56
M Levac M Levac is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 6,498
 
Plan: VLC, mostly meat
Stats: 202/200/165 Male 5' 7"
BF:
Progress: 5%
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Default

I recently wrote a private essay where I considered the question of discrimination in favor of the obese and the sick. I'm still debating if I'll post it publicly.

From a pragmatic point of view, if an obese candidate can't fit in a vehicle for example, then he would not be appropriate for a job that required him to drive that vehicle. Yet we adapt infrastructure all the time to enable wheel chair access so I don't see a problem with adapting a vehicle to an obese worker. Doing so removes the factor that would otherwise act as incentive to discriminate against workers who use a wheel chair or are obese. But then those adaptations come at a price to the employer. For this problem, the cost could simply be passed to the candidate, or to the customers of the enterprise, or to society, or any combination of the above. Somebody's gotta make the adaptations, therefore somebody's gotta pay the maker's salary.

I'm pretty sure all the logistics have been worked out already. So it's not really a question of whether we can discriminate against the obese, but whether we want to assume the costs of not discriminating against the obese. Otherwise, I see no other reason to discriminate against the obese.

-edit-

Quote:
Now, for the record, with rare exceptions, if you are overweight it's because you eat too much and exercise too little.

Oh boy, does the author get it wrong. The correct statement is "with rare exceptions, if you are overweight it's because of your hormones." Though the rest of it is pretty smart especially the potential consequences.

Last edited by M Levac : Wed, Apr-04-12 at 18:07.
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  #9   ^
Old Wed, Apr-04-12, 18:06
mike_d's Avatar
mike_d mike_d is offline
Grease is the word!
Posts: 8,475
 
Plan: PSMF/IF
Stats: 236/181/180 Male 72 inches
BF:disappearing!
Progress: 98%
Location: Alamo city, Texas
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by bobiam
is this any different than not hiring smokers?

or drug users?

or people with other undesirable behaviors?
I can see people that are overweight might have some other undesirable personality traits (as far as being employable goes) other than just the overeating, not caring about their general health and being lazy.
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  #10   ^
Old Wed, Apr-04-12, 18:25
ICDogg's Avatar
ICDogg ICDogg is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 1,563
 
Plan: Low carb, high fat keto
Stats: 310/212/183 Male 6'0"
BF:D
Progress: 77%
Location: Philadelphia area
Default

Medical costs for the obese on average are much higher. That's one justification.
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  #11   ^
Old Wed, Apr-04-12, 20:16
aj_cohn's Avatar
aj_cohn aj_cohn is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 3,948
 
Plan: Protein Power
Stats: 213/167/165 Male 65 in.
BF:35%/23%/20%
Progress: 96%
Location: United States
Default

A poster who goes by the handle "rightnow" is morbidly obese, by the medical definition and her own admission, and she's one of the more insightful posters on this forum. Judging only from her own posts, she's got a crappy set of genetics related to the hormones that control weight, and so does her daughter. She's done all the things we recommend on this forum to lose weight, and it hasn't worked.

Moreover, it seems like most of the post-menopausal women on this forum have a very tough time losing weight, despite doing all the things we recommend on this forum to lose weight.

Do we, as a society, want to just cast people like them aside?
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  #12   ^
Old Wed, Apr-04-12, 20:24
kyrasdad's Avatar
kyrasdad kyrasdad is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 3,060
 
Plan: Atkins
Stats: 338/253/210 Male 5'11"
BF:
Progress: 66%
Location: Broken Arrow, Oklahoma
Default

Thing is, a smoker can hide it. So can a drinker, etc. Do they similarly refuse to hire these groups? Do they test to confirm?
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  #13   ^
Old Wed, Apr-04-12, 20:27
Labhrain's Avatar
Labhrain Labhrain is offline
Real food!
Posts: 3,115
 
Plan: Lower Carb/IF
Stats: 238/155/140 Female 67 inches
BF:
Progress: 85%
Location: NorCal
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by mike_d
I can see people that are overweight might have some other undesirable personality traits (as far as being employable goes) other than just the overeating, not caring about their general health and being lazy.


Really? Some of the hardest working people I've known have been fat. I once had a boss who was rather obese. She worked harder than everyone else in the office combined, and to this day she is quite an asset to the agency for which she works, as well as the community in which she lives. And, she's certainly not been an anomaly in my experience. I've known plenty of rather overweight workers who are very hard workers and assets to their employers. The myth that fat people are lazy is just that - a myth. They are no more likely or no less likely to be lazy at their jobs than skinny people.
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  #14   ^
Old Thu, Apr-05-12, 00:15
rightnow's Avatar
rightnow rightnow is offline
Every moment is NOW.
Posts: 23,064
 
Plan: LC (ketogenic)
Stats: 520/381/280 Female 66 inches
BF: Why yes it is.
Progress: 58%
Location: Ozarks USA
Default

Hmmnn.

1 - Just to be clear: lowcarb DID work to lose weight for me. However, it had a limit (about 170#), after which it no longer had the same effect, possibly because I no longer had the same body. Seeming issues with thyroid, with literal inability to go into ketosis or crisis-reaction if my body tried, etc. kicked in. I think lowcarb is a dream come true for +/- 30# of 200# for women, and for +/- 30# of 240# for men. After that, I suspect the body has done what it can from that perspective, and other elements matter.

(Also, regardless of that, I think there is a great deal of evidence mounting that bodies see their high-weight as something to be returned to--as if all lower weights are a temporary setback--and the higher the weight, the more an issue this might be. This affects everything from brain chemicals to taste buds and is probably horribly underrated when looking at weight regain stats.)

What might be the issue at that point, and how to deal with it, I'm not yet clear on. Dr. Andro (blog at suppversity.blogspot.com) said the following, and I don't want to derail this thread with this--it could be argued elsewhere--but I put it here only to point out that this is not one individual (me) saying it, this is a pretty common experience in the field not often openly addressed in LC areas and which often leads to some flamewars:
Quote:
(After explaining why LC is a good solution for fat loss -- to a degree...) There is, I believe, a point where the pathological insulin resistance due to morbid obesity, hypertriglyceridemia and chronic inflammation turns into a “physiological” insulin resistance, which is NECESSARY for your body to survive on a no-carb diet. After all your muscles would suck away the little blood glucose you have in no time, if they were not insulin resistant. When this point of “physiological” insulin resistance is reached – the low-carb diet begins to show its nasty face. Weight loss stalls, thyroid hormone metabolism suffers, you name it…
There may be other issues with extended VLC for some people who are not that size.

Anyway, I just don't want the fact that I did LC and lost weight but have gradually regained some and never lost all of it to reflect poorly on LC -- LC itself is a great eating plan, whether it's moderately higher-carb or zero-carb, certainly much better than most of what else is out there for human health.

I think it's simply a matter of there being only a certain degree of damage, for a certain length of time, that one can do and then expect to just 'fix it easily'. If I'd done it when I weighed 320 it likely would have worked. I didn't start until around 520 so, there are consequences, it seems.

I'm still a big fan of some 'unexplored territory' I find interesting, particularly related to gut bacteria. There isn't exactly much opportunity to experiment with this as a layman unfortunately.


2 - How on earth does obesity get compared to illegal drug use? Do we compare (lean) people who eat a lot of fast food with cocaine addicts? Does that seem reasonable? This literally equates being obese with CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR. Could we at the least limit this to comparisons with smoking instead of 'drugs' which implies the illegal element?

It's bad enough obese people have to be assumed everything-else-bad, must they be criminal, too...


3 - I've been in management for over 20 years. The idea that fat people are lazy is bogus. In fact, if anything it has often been the opposite, which I think implies that there is some conscious or unconscious "compensation factor" going on with fat people in the workplace, e.g. that when they feel like being lazy (which is likely no more or less than anyone else), they have a fear triggered that they will be perceived as lazy--because by cultural bias they already are--which may modify some behavior.

There are some things fat people will simply not be able to do based on size (I cannot fit into compact cars). If my job required I park compact cars, I wouldn't be right for that job, obviously.

If my job required I meet people and my business had reason to feel that cultural prejudice against my size would screw up the result no matter how I dressed or behaved, then I could see that argument being fair too, even though this identical logic could exclude all people who were a minority race, too short, too tall, had large noses, or whatever.

But--it does, actually, happen all the time, that such things are considerations; even at the most mundane jobs, such as in my town, I can go to certain food places run by 'the owner' (vs. a corporate branch manager) and notice that nearly all the employees are pretty thin high school girls; it's the booby-blonde-alert! if you walk in, they're all just adorable. You don't see the same profile of employees at Taco Bell where some branch manager who is only there sometimes and is more conscious of HR compliance is in charge.

4 - I've seen at least one research study, likely more but eons ago, which indicated that women in management were more prone to be or become overweight, moreso than the line personnel, suggesting that stress was a big variable. So some of the logic about laziness would imply that the people most likely to be promoted (the least lazy) are in fact the most likely to become fat, which would then make them-- wait, that logic doesn't work...

PJ
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  #15   ^
Old Thu, Apr-05-12, 00:42
rightnow's Avatar
rightnow rightnow is offline
Every moment is NOW.
Posts: 23,064
 
Plan: LC (ketogenic)
Stats: 520/381/280 Female 66 inches
BF: Why yes it is.
Progress: 58%
Location: Ozarks USA
Default

PS Medical costs for the obese I know aren't higher. I have a whole collection of lean friends and their lean children who are damn near walking illness and injury factories and are in the doc and ER and hospital so often that any given 2 year period in any of their lives exceeds my ENTIRE life of medical assistance combined. Same for my kid. I'm sure it varies per person. But unless one is simply using the "correlation of obesity to disease", I think the disease element must be the reasoning behind the claim that obese people use more medical $. Because I have not seen obesity on its own have any impact on medical attention.

In a way, often even less, as obese people don't really feel the need to go to a doctor who will lecture them, assume they lie about their food, nurses who assume they should get gutted for their own good, etc. I get a female exam at the women's clinic every couple of years just to make my stepmother shut up about it, and every couple years I stop in at the pharmacy clinic and get an inhaler so if I eat gluten (which gives me asthma) I'll have a rescue on the occasional time I need it. Neither of those even relate to fat. And I almost never (nor my kid) go to the doctor for illness. We get about 1 per 12 illnesses that "everyone around us" has. And I've no desire to annihilate our immune system with drugs so we avoid that.

The only thing I've been to the doc for in the last few years is a wasp sting that got infected. I got a steroid shot for it (it ached in my arm for a few days but wow I felt great!). Nothing to do with fat. Got a tetanus booster and a (gluten-based) asthma inhaler. All in a clinic visit of about 20 minutes.

I credit that to eating LC (dominantly "meat") more of the time than the average population around us, but who knows.

PJ
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