Coffee!!: Atheism as a major cause of obesity?

Man demonstrates the ease of proving the existence of French fries.
Photo by James Heilman, MD

Along the lines of religion and health, a friend absolutely insists that I write about this:

From a medical perspective, an obese person has accumulated enough body fat that it can have a negative effect on their health. If a person's weight is at least 20% higher than it should be, he/she is generally considered obese. If your Body Mass Index (BMI) is between 25 and 29.9 you are considered overweight. If your BMI is 30 or over you are considered obese.[6] The term obese can also used in a more general way to indicate someone who is overweight.[7]


Two of the major risk factors for becoming obese according to the Mayo Clinic are poor dietary choices and inactivity, thus given the above cited Gallup research, it appears as if non-religious are more prone to becoming obese than very religious individuals.[8] The Bible declares that gluttony is a sin.[9] Furthermore, the Bible declares the physical body of Christians to be temples of the Holy Spirit.[10] Therefore, it is not surprising that many very religious Christians would leave healthy lives.

Well, ... you heard it here first.

I hope the ID controversy won’t degenerate into a “Who’s a tub of lard?” war, a temptation to which my friend may have just possibly given way ...

Seriously, more on religion and health here.

Religion and health: Practising believers feel most in control

A study of 1800 Americans by University of Toronto sociology prof Scott Schieman finds that religious beliefs and devotion are linked to a sense of personal control.

That surprised Schieman:

“One might think the most devout religious practitioners would feel a lack of personal control in their lives because they have such faith in divine control,” says Schieman. “Surprisingly, we found the opposite. It’s those who believe in God but don’t dedicate much time to practicing religion who feel the least in control of their lives.”

It's not really hard to understand, though. If people think they should be doing something and are doing it, they will feel that they are in control. However, if they think they should be doing something but are not doing it, they will feel that they are not in control. And they're right, too.

I cannot find the abstract online at the journal, Sociology of Religion, which seems to be moving to a new publisher.

Ah well, in the meantime, another one for the "Religion spoils everything" files ...

See also:

See also:

Albert Einstein College of Medicine: Religious practice prolongs life, unexplained factor cited

Adopting a dog better for your health than pills?

Religion and health: Some teens more, not less, depressed due to religion?

Albert Einstein College of Medicine: Religious practice prolongs life, unexplained factor cited

According to this Eurekalert press release:

November 19, 2008 -(BRONX, NY) - A study published by researchers at Yeshiva University and its medical school, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, strongly suggests that regular attendance at religious services reduces the risk of death by approximately 20 percent. The findings, published in Psychology and Health, were based on data drawn from participants who spanned numerous religious denominations. The research was conducted by Eliezer Schnall, Ph.D., clinical assistant professor of psychology at Yeshiva College of Yeshiva University, and co-authored by Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology and population health at Einstein, as an ancillary study of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI). The WHI is a national, long-term study aimed at addressing women's health issues and funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The researchers evaluated the religious practices of 92,395 post-menopausal women participating in the WHI. They examined the prospective association of religious affiliation, religious service attendance, and strength and comfort derived from religion with subsequent cardiovascular events and overall rates of mortality. Although the study showed as much as a 20 percent decrease in the overall risk of mortality for those attending religious services, it did not show any consistent change in rates of morbidity and death specifically related to cardiovascular disease, with no explanation readily evident.

The study adjusted for participation of individuals within communal organizations and group activities that promote a strong social life and enjoyable routines, behaviors known to lead to overall wellness. However, even after controlling for such behavior and other health-related factors, the improvements in morbidity and mortality rates exceeded expectations.

"Interestingly, the protection against mortality provided by religion cannot be entirely explained by expected factors that include enhanced social support of friends or family, lifestyle choices and reduced smoking and alcohol consumption," said Dr. Schnall, who was lead author of the study. "There is something here that we don't quite understand. It is always possible that some unknown or unmeasured factors confounded these results," he added.

Here's the study, published in Psychology and Health, the official journal of the European Health Psychology Society.

As Mario and I discussed in The Spiritual Brain, for a long time, the links were unexplored, due to a tendency among researchers to doubt their existence. Starting in the early 1970s, that assumption was challenged by a growing body of research that shows that an active spiritual life really does improve physical health. Today, that is an uncontroversial view among health researchers (though not, perhaps, popular with certain best-selling atheist writers … ).

Obviously, a complex of factors must be cited in a study that involved nearly 100 000 women, whether or not they "exceeded expectations." How about:

- cultural respect for older people, which is normal in religious groups

- specific teachings that promote a healthy lifestyle

- practical help with daily living (for example, religious-sponsored retirement homes, including volunteers who help with daily activities)

- the good mental health effects of prayer, meditation, and volunteering

- the reduced fear of death (which, ironically, may contribute to longer life by preventing dangerous panic episodes)

- a sense of continuity ("After I die, others will continue the jobs I know are important.")

Now what about that “unexplained” factor?

Was it faith? Was it hope? Studies capture what they can capture. We needn’t be concerned that a researcher can’t point to faith or hope on a lab slide. What we can point to is the favourable effect of spirituality on our bodily health, even if not all the factors are easily separable from each other.

Adopting a dog better for your health than pills?

An e-mail from Canada's historic Maclean's Magazine tells me that "Pfizer believes in more than medication":

If so, Pfizer agrees with most Canadians:

While the results of Pfizer Canada’s More than Medication Survey* were sometimes surprising, the in-depth Ipsos-Reid survey (conducted between December 2007 and January 2008) involving 4,001 consumers, 200 physicians and 190 natural health experts, showed more similarity than differences between the three groups.

“More than 90% of all three groups (consumers, family physicians and natural health experts) agree that good health is about More than Medication — and the majority agree the most important ways to stay healthy include: eating well, regular exercise, keeping a positive attitude, supportive friends and family and spirituality/religion,” says Sean Simpson, Ipsos-Reid.

The message from Maclean's focused on adopting a dog - a great idea if you want to go out a lot with someone who totally loves you.

Campaigns like these signal a departure from the much more materialist and mechanist attitude of decades ago (= got a problem, take a pill). As Mario Beauregard and I noted in The Spiritual Brain,

... by the 1960s, materialism was so pervasive in medicine that [Herbert] Benson had a hard time persuading his colleagues that mental stress could contribute to high blood pressure. Mentors warned that he was risking his career when he began to study the physiology of meditation in an effort to understand how the mind influences the body. (Pp. 233-34)

The question of whether mental stress contributes to high blood pressure continues to be a source of controversy, but the idea that meditation might help is now uncontroversial, at least in principle.

And will Pfizer go broke, encouraging people to adopt dogs instead of take pills? I doubt it. Pfizer has a big veterinary medicine division - Pfizer Animal Health.

Religion: Who don't modern people find the miracles in the Bible a barrier to belief?

An agnostic friend asked me that question in the title recently. I thought about it for a minute, and replied, "Many people either become religious or rediscover the religion in which they were raised because of an unusual experience.

Perhaps they were healed when they didn't expect to be. Perhaps their life was spared in quite unusual circumstances. Or maybe something like that happened to someone they care about.

Anyway, as a result, they don't find accounts of unusual events impossible to believe. They don't necessarily have an explanation for these events. Nor are they gullible. But their universe includes rather than excludes unusual events, at least in principle."

Religion and health: Some teens more, not less, depressed due to religion?

Science Daily informs us that religion may make teens from certain races more depressed:

Previous research has shown that teens who are active in religious services are depressed less often because it provides these adolescents with social support and a sense of belonging.

But new research has found that this does not hold true for all adolescents, particularly for minorities and some females. The study found that white and African-American adolescents generally had fewer symptoms of depressive at high levels of religious participation. But for some Latino and Asian-American adolescents, attending church more often was actually affecting their mood in a negative way.

Why?

The results suggest that something unique was affecting adolescents within these two groups when they went to church often. Petts believes that the traditional nature of religion for these two groups may be conflicting with the ideals and customs of mainstream American society. This conflict may be putting additional stress on these youth as they try to balance competing principles and traditions, he said.

"Asian and Latino youth who are highly involved in a culturally distinct church may have a more difficult time balancing the beliefs of their family and their traditional culture with mainstream society. Their religious institution is telling them what should be important in their lives and how to behave, and mainstream society is saying something else," he said.

Here's a thought: It is possible that the Asian American and Latino youth are disproportionately from families that have not lived in the United States as long, and the teens may not realize that the consumerist values aimed at them in advertisements are simply not compatible with a spiritual tradition. White and African-American teens from a religious background would more likely take that for granted, thus reducing conflict by deciding for one or the other.

Prayer: Asking for more than healing

Speaking of prayer (story below), in "Do we have a prayer?" in The American Spectator, editor Quin Hillyer reflects on politicial activists and prayer:

Most of us have known people, too, who swear, absolutely swear, that they are alive today after some dread illness only because the prayers of others got them through. But then we wonder about those like Snow who did not survive, and none of it makes sense. Do prayers work? How? Why? And when they don't seem to, at least not by our understanding, why not?

He notes,

... we know that prayer doesn't necessarily bring comfort, or at least not "comfort" in the way the world usually understands it. Prayer does not bring comfort in the sense of ease or luxury or softness.

Ah ... word study urgently needed here: "Comfort" originally meant "strengthen" (the "com" part = with, and the "fort" part = strength). Later, "comfort" came to mean "ease" or "soothe." That created much misunderstanding around the idea that prayer "comforts" people.

Here is my view as a Catholic Christian: I have myself benefited from several healings that could only be attributed to the power of prayer, however understood. I would encourage anyone to pray, even if they are not a religious believer. Just say, "I know I am not a good person, but this feels too hard for me to bear. If You are out there, help me, please, at least to understand what is happening to me."

The main role of prayer is to put us in touch with God's view of our situation. We benefit from prayer to the extent that it does that. We benefit little from prayer if we view it as a way to make God do what we want.

In that case, even if we seem to get what we want for now, we will not grow into the people we should be. And there will come a time when we don't get what we want, and we also did not learn anything that would help us see the bigger picture. So we stop praying, and stop growing spiritually. Which is very sad because healing is only one of the benefits of prayer.

We are all going to die someday, which means that all healings are temporary. So I would say, by all means ask for healing, but don't stop there. Ask for insight too, for the day when healings come to an end.

Dawkins blasted in Skeptical magazine

Dinesh D'Souza draws our attention to the fact that some of atheist crusader Richard Dawkins's fellow atheists (and agnostics?) may be getting fed up with him. How else to explain David Sloan Wilson, whose work on a hypothetical evolutionary basis for religion Mario and I discuss in The Spiritual Brain, having this to say in Skeptic, a magazine the majority of whose readers are probably atheists or agnostics? As quoted/summarized by D'Souza:

"Richard Dawkins and I share much in common. We are both biologists by training who have written widely about evolutionary theory." Moreover, "We are both atheists in our personal convictions." Then Wilson gets to his point. "When Dawkins' The God Delusion was published, I naturally assumed he was basing his critique of religion on the scientific study of religion from an evolutionary perspective. I regret to report otherwise. He has not done any original work on the subject and he has not fairly represented the work of his colleagues." Rather, Dawkins has subjected his atheist readers to "sleights of hand." He has produced a "diatribe against religion" that is "deeply misinformed." Indeed he is "just another angry atheist trading on his reputation as an evolutionst and spokesperson for science to vent his personal opinions about religion."

To this strong stuff from Wilson, D'Souza adds,

Wilson examines Dawkins' central claim that religion is an obvious "delusion." On the contrary, Wilson writes, religion is in general more adaptive for human communities than atheism. "On average, religious believers are more prosocial than non-believers, feel better about themselves, use their time more constructively, and engage in long-term planning, rather than gratifying their impulsive desires...They report being more happy, active, sociable, involved and excited."

Here's Wilson's blast in Skeptic in full.

Sure, Wilson (and D'Souza) but the thing is, everybody KNOWS this stuff. Or should. The data's been out there for a long time. (See Chapter 8 of The Spiritual Brain for a handy little discussion of key findings about the role of spirituality in promoting health - and of reasons why such data tend to get shelved.)

Anyway, it's nice to see people being Skeptical in more than one direction. If the skeptics think that what Wilson is saying is not true, they are only fooling themselves, and rants about Islamic extremists are only distractions.

(Muslim friends tell me that the extremists are not particularly spiritually minded at all; they want power over other people and religion is their ploy of getting it. And the extremists have chosen an orientation to their religion that means they'll likely kill themselves trying ... is that divine justice or what?)

Anyway, D'Souza's always fun and so is Wilson here.

Health:Hospitals factor lifestyle beliefs and practices into wellness

Some hospitals have come a long way toward realizing how important it is to adapt to the life beliefs of patients, especially the older ones, according to a recent article in Jewish World Review:.

The hospital perks of yesteryear — designer gowns, valet parking, Internet access — stressed luxury and convenience. Today, hospitals have found G-d.

Hospitals are now touting "Shabbat elevators" for observant Jews, "bloodless surgery" for J ehovah's Witnesses and Muslim prayer rooms.

The new services show that hospitals have begun adapting to the religious mosaic of patients — and are increasingly marketing to patients not by disease or age, but by belief.

I say it's about time. Forcing people to violate their beliefs in order to get treatment is a bad idea:

"The last thing you want to worry about while somebody is sick is that they might have to transgress on something they believe in," said Zahava Cohen, Englewood's patient care director.
When Cohen's father was hospitalized years ago in New York, he couldn't get the required food needed for Passover. For the first time in his life, he broke the dietary rules for the holiday. "It was horrible," Cohen said.

By contrast, reassuring them that optimum health is consistent with their beliefs - wherever that view is consistent with reality - is a much sounder strategy for health care, irrespective of the caregiver's own beliefs.