Feds Spend $1.5 Million to Study Why Lesbians Are Fat
My reaction: 1) Who cares? 2) Why isn't the sequester stopping stuff like this? 3) They're spending on stuff like this and they want more taxes?
March 11, 2013
By Elizabeth Harrington
 The NIH is funding studies to determine why nearly three-quarters of adult lesbians are overweight or obese, compared to half of heterosexual women. (AP Photo)
(CNSNews.com) – The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $1.5 million to study biological and social factors for why “three-quarters” of lesbians are obese and why gay males are not, calling it an issue of “high public-health significance."
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mass., has received two grants administered by NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to study the relationship between sexual orientation and obesity.
“Obesity is one of the most critical public health issues affecting the U.S. today,” the description of the grant reads. “Racial and socioeconomic disparities in the determinants, distribution, and consequences of obesity are receiving increasing attention.”
“[H]owever, one area that is only beginning to be recognized is the striking interplay of gender and sexual orientation in obesity disparities,” it states. “It is now well-established that women of minority sexual orientation are disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic, with it continues.
“In stark contrast, among men, heterosexual males have nearly double the risk of obesity compared to gay males.”
The investigators say there has been “almost no” research devoted to this disparity, and they have set out to find the biological, psychological, and social factors behind it.
The project is being led by S. Bryn Austin, Director of Fellowship Research Training in the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. Austin is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health, and an Associate Epidemiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), which is a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.
BWH first received a $778,622 grant for the study in 2011, followed by a $741,378 grant in 2012, totaling $1,520,000. The project has the potential to be a five-year study.
The grants list a “project end date” and a “budget end date” of June 30, 2016. The researchers said the subject is one of “high public-health significance.”
However, the NICHD said the future of the project is uncertain because of the sequester--automatic spending cuts that took effect on March 1.
"The NIH is currently assessing the impact on funding due to sequestration," said Robert Bock, Press Officer for the NICHD. "It is not possible to say how this (or any other NIH grant) will be affected in the long term beyond the 90 percent funding levels already in place."
"Obesity is a serious public health problem affecting a large proportion of the U.S. population," Bock said. "The study is examining reasons why the risk of obesity varies according to sexual orientation, in order to inform the development of future strategies to prevent obesity."
The researchers said the subject is one of “high public-health significance.”
“It will be impossible to develop evidence-based preventive interventions unless we first answer basic questions about causal pathways, as we plan to do,” they said. “Our study has high potential for public health impact not only for sexual minorities but also for heterosexuals, as we seek to uncover how processes of gender socialization may exacerbate obesity risk in both sexual minority females and heterosexual males.”
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/feds-spend-15-million-study-why-lesbians-are-fat
Feds Spend $1.5 Million to Study Why Lesbians Are Fat?
Posted on 13 March 2013 by Briggs
 Obesity in lesbians is a health crisis
The title was taken from the CNS News story of the same name, which made ripples in the news yesterday (Drudge linked to it).
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $1.5 million to study biological and social factors for why “three-quarters” of lesbians are obese and why gay males are not, calling it an issue of “high public-health significance.”
If this is true, you know what it means, of course. It means that TV and the movies have lied to us. Systematically, and over a long period of time.
When was the last time you saw a show or movie in which a woman oriented towards other women wasn’t hot, svelte, able to wiggle into hipster jeans without grunting? I’ll tell you when. Never. There’s even a popular sub-genre, which I’ve heard is distributed on the internet, which delights in displaying actively oriented non-obese non-heterosexual females. Our first clue should have been that the audience for such fare was (obese or not) men oriented towards women.
Science however can’t be wrong, or questioned. According to the well-funded grant (to the tune of $741,378 of your money—where was the sequester when it was needed?) Sexual Orientation and Obesity: Test of a Gendered Biopsychosocial Model Obesity “nearly three-quarters of adult lesbians [are] overweight or obese.”
S. Bryn Austin, Director of Fellowship Research Training in the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, used that scientific statistic to convince the government to part with money to study the statistics of overweight lesbians. In other words, Austin claims already to know lesbians are fatter than normal women, but he wants (and got) three-quarters of a million to verify it.
Some of that money will be spent studying why, “n stark contrast, among men, heterosexual males have nearly double the risk of obesity compared to gay males.” Austin even has a theory. He and his group “will rigorously test our innovative gendered biopsychosocial model to explain sexual orientation disparities in obesity with prospective, repeated measures survey data and biological data from three national youth cohorts.”
Sounds like the solution to the obesity “epidemic” is to have heterosexual men and non-heterosexual women switch their orientations. Maybe science can develop a pill? Or is the education provided in our public schools sufficient?
Anyway, if you’re upset about the money Austin gets, consider these facts. Austin himself only keeps half a million. He has to hand over the other quarter-mill as “protection” to his Dean (funds which are euphemistically called “overhead”). Plus, Austin was only being smart. Turns out the government issued an announcement begging people to take its money to study these things. If it wasn’t Austin, it would have been somebody else.
Yes. “PA-07-409?, or Health Research with Diverse Populations, was government instigated. It’s focus “is on research that bears upon on the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and other diverse populations.”
[ Whoops, there's another new term .... "intersex." Dame Sandra Fluke used the term "Questioning community" recently. Now there's an intersex community. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and intersex and we know there's more coming because they say "other diverse populations." I'm waiting for vegesexuals to be used. ]
I know, or think I know, the meaning of the first four terms, but I haven’t any idea what “intersex” means, and I’m leery of typing it into a browser. I notice, however, that it’s at the end of a list which is ordered by increasing unusualness. This is why “other diverse populations”, which could mean anything, comes last.
Oh, the $1.5 million in the title arises because the government, in its ever-increasing benevolence, handed out more than one grant on the subject. If anything, the figure is a gross understatement. On just the first page of grants “similar to” Austin’s, at least $10 million more was spent.
We glean from these grants that the preferred term for non-heterosexuality is “sexual minority”, which has a pleasing, civil rights, social justice ring to it.
A couple of other awards: Stress Reactivity and Substance Use Among Sexual Minority Girls ($339,887; boys, you’ll have to wait), Risk and Protective Factors for Suicide Among Sexual Minority Youth ($598,609), Cumulative Stress and Hazardous Drinking in a Community Sample of Adult Lesbians ($602,989), etc. forever.
What the novice reader might not understand is that all these grants are in the pipeline, thus that each will result in many to dozens of papers, and that each of these will call for more research, which itself will seem justified because the mass of “work” in the field makes the field appear important. The thing is self-perpetuating.
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=7524
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