A recently published Mallard Fillmore newspaper cartoon about obesity disrespected science by purposely misrepresenting it.
The conservative comic strip was published in my local paper Aug. 9, ironically the 80th anniversary of Americas cataclysmic A-bomb attack on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945, one of historys most alarming and also among the most catastrophic and morally fraught demonstrations of sciences jaw-dropping, world-transforming power.
The long, excruciatingly detailed path to creating a working atomic bomb included countless small research and development steps as science requires any number of which might have been seen by nonscientists as incomprehensible, if not pointless.
Which brings us to the recent Mallard Fillmore cartoons take on a Duke University study, released this July. The study concluded that caloric intake is a far more significant culprit in obesity than how much energy a person expends, or not, in their daily life.
To which, Mallard said, in effect: duh.
A recently published Mallard Fillmore newspaper cartoon about obesity disrespected science by purposely misrepresenting it.
The long, excruciatingly detailed path to creating a working atomic bomb included countless small research and development steps as science requires any number of which might have been seen by nonscientists as incomprehensible, if not pointless.
Which brings us to the recent Mallard Fillmore cartoons take on a Duke University study, released this July. The study concluded that caloric intake is a far more significant culprit in obesity than how much energy a person expends, or not, in their daily life.
To which, Mallard said, in effect: duh.
Heres the cartoons text:
A new study from Duke University has revealed that obesity is closely linked to a poor diet, which is fascinating, because without this study, we might have never known that Duke even had a department of observing the blindingly obvious while accepting hundreds of millions in federal research grants.
Two phrases in that toon text jump out: a poor diet and blindingly obvious. Note that the Duke study found obesity predominant in advanced nations that enjoy abundant and varied, not poor, diets. Also, science is intrinsically skeptical because supposedly blindingly obvious truths have been proved staggeringly wrong over millennia, including the Bibles casual acknowledgement that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Pioneer scientists Nikolas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei (and others) proved irrefutably in the Middle Ages, much to the chagrin of the monolithic Catholic Church, that the opposite is true.
So, a widely popular cartoonists ignorant denigration of science in the 21st century is a problem, as was the Catholic Churchs debasement and banishment of Galileo to house arrest for the rest of his life and a prohibition from discussing or teaching his heliocentric theory that the Sun sits at the center of the solar system, orbited by all the planets, including Earth. For thousands of years, the learned consensus had been that not only did the Sun orbit Earth, the Earth was the center of the entire universe.
This kind of intellectual suppression born of science-wary ideology is still with us in the modern world. We mustnt forget, for example, that the president of the United States a few years ago urged Americans to consider injecting bleach as a curative for COVID-19, which was devastating the nation and world at the time.
Ultimately, about a million Americans died during the pandemic, which was finally blunted not by bleach or other fraudulent, harebrained treatments but by miraculously effective vaccines developed by scientists in record time vaccines now being undermined by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trumps vehemently anti-vax U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, in his first six months on the job and after telling Congress, under oath, that he would not undermine vaccines, removed all vaccine and infectious disease experts from the federal Center for Disease Controls independent and essential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Replacements included vaccine deniers. This is numbskull ideology warring against settled science. Vaccines have saved untold millions of lives worldwide over many decades. Decades of countless respected studies have roundly debunked the vaccine fears of Kennedy and his ilk. The overwhelming conclusion of research is that vaccines are demonstrably safe and also dont cause autism, another favorite Kennedy bugaboo.
Which brings me back to obesity, Mallard Fillmore, and South Dakotas relationship with rotundity, and why a comic strips unfounded denigration of science about obesity matters. 2011 study report available in the National Library of Medicine, titled The obesity epidemic in South Dakota: how big is the problem? reported that 30.3% of the states adults self-reported being obese (based on the body mass index), a rate then higher than the national prevalence and also increasing at a faster rate than other states. By 2023, the states adult obese population increased more than five points to 36%, making South Dakota tied for the 11th highest rate of obesity in the U.S.
So, Mallard Fillmore aside, we dont know whether South Dakotans are relatively rotund because they eat too much, move too little, or have chubby genes. Or something else entirely.
But the place to find the answer is nuanced science, not ill-informed, snarky cartoons.
Leave a Reply