[Brandon]

Originally Posted by dr2005

I'm steering clear of this from now on, but I will clear up one thing:



Obesity is a medical condition with a wide range of physical components and consequences, but it is not possessive of any criteria which make it a mental illness. In particular there is no evidence of being consistently associated with a psychological or behavoural syndrome - in short, it can often have physical symptoms only. It can be a symptom of certain mental illnesses such as binge eating disorder, but being a symptom of a mental illness and being a mental illness from the outset are very different things, and as such obesity was considered and rejected for DSM-V. I would recommend reading the following on this point:

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/jo...al-health-myth
• http://www.psych.org/MainMenu/Resear...oupReport.aspx
• http://articles.cnn.com/2010-06-01/h...2?_s=PM:HEALTH

I'll comment more on this later. I have an article about obesity in American in a magazine that can probably provide me some evidence to support myself too. And, of course, I'll look further into your links as well.

"indirectly, food commercials promote obesity"
Ie, they hold some responsibility.

By the way, if so many people are apparently 'misinterpreting' what you are saying then it should be an indicator to you that you're not being clear.

We're going in circles here just repeating what we previously said so I'm just going to call it a day.

What I'm saying is very clear, but you have to dissect each word by word. For instance, the example you provided:

"indirectly, food commercials promote obesity"

In this evidence, I said that food commercials promote obesity. But what does promote mean? It means to help or encourage, meaning that I'm saying food commercials help or encourage obesity, but they most certainly aren't the main thing responsible. I'm a strong believer that people are in charge of their lives and make their own choices, which is apparently obvious in this thread since I've mentioned it over and over again, so we have no disagreement there. So, that's not valid evidence to suggest that I said that advertisements are responsible for obesity. Indeed, when someone holds a strong opinion and another person holds a strong opinion, it probably leads to going around in circles. lol. But I've made my opinion, I've backed my opinion to the best of my abilities, and I'll still continue to respond to the posts that are not repetitive.