BBC Health News Fail

The BBC's health page today has two articles today 'relevent' to my blog..

Article 1.

Media is Fuelling Eating Disorders

The basic gist being that magazines should not be promoting an unhealthy (ie. emaciated) 'aspirational' body image, that there should be laws about using models who are blatently unwell and/or showing manipulated images showing an exaggerated, severely edited or just plain impossible body image with no indication that they have been altered.

In general, I'd have to say I agree with this, and think that the media has a responsibility not to encourage it's readers into desperate, damaging behaviours to fit into a tiny, perfect mould that not even the people in the photographs will fit into.  With photoshop, I think that images manipulated should have some kind of label, preferably a line of small-print detailing exactly what has been done to the original image.

Particularly in adverts.

I'm particularly impressed with them wanting to extend this warning system to articles promoting diets.

This bit, however, we could do without "...Dr Ian Campbell, a Nottingham GP and spokesman for the charity Weight Concern, said the way the media glamorised thinness made it harder for obese patients to lose weight."

The media's obession with thinness does not make it "more difficult for [us fat fat fatty fatties] to lose weight" (words in brackets my artistic licence) - it's disorting almost every woman's (and an increasingly high proportion of men's) body image and relationship with food.  It's increasingly difficult to find anyone without the millstone of disordered eating dragging their heads towards the ground, let's face it, Cosmo isn't exactly helping matters much.

"Article" 2 (quotations mine there, of course)

Obesity Rise on Death Certificates

In which the BBC confuse "obesity being blamed for more deaths" with "obesity to blame for more deaths", undoing in one, lazy-arsed attempt at serious journalism, all the respect for them the previous article had gleaned....

Proof if proof be needed to remind us all that we've got a hell of a long way to go before the media take notice of us, and that we still need to KEEP SHOUTING!