Glee and fat stereotypes

A quick post. So, Glee is supposed to be about acceptance, tolerance, diversity of color, sexual orientation and size (with it's one plus-sized character.) Did anyone notice last night on the tater-tot episode that it seemed like only the kids of size were indulging in the tater tots or shown as gluttons? When Sue was in her office, 3 very large teen girls were shown outside her door. All were in drab colors, drab make-up and hair and all were literally stuffing their faces with various "junk" foods.  It was Sue's inspiration to ban tater tots. Mercedes does the stereotypical "food is love" dance of eating more tots because she is lonely.Just saying it perpetuates the stereotype that kids are fat because they eat too much,  and of the "wrong" foods. Do some of them? Yes, but there are just as many skinny kids eating garbage too. Perpetuating that fat is from gluttonous overeating makes the blame game, bullying and shaming that much easier. (All now couched in the language of "obesity prevention" and the war on obesity, so it's not really bullying, it's concern for health! You can pretty much guarantee a fat child has been bullied.(Neumark-Sztainer) Just saying this episode didn't help.)I have to admit, before I really looked into the data and learned about feeding dynamics, I thought it was just calories in, calories out. I assumed kids were fat because they ate too much of the wrong foods. I was surprised to learn that you can't predict what someone will weight based on their intake (OK, at the very extremes you probably can.) But, in infants,  studies have shown that leaner infants often consume less and move more than their fatter counterparts.  The Huh milk study I mentioned last week also showed the leanest kids drank whole milk and consumed the most calories. A study on soda in schools in 2009 in the ADA mentioned that the lean and fat kids drank the same amount of soda. So much for the "obesity in a bottle" theory. The 17 year DONALD study in Germany compared fat, fiber, calories etc and found that there were plenty of big kids eating 'atoricious' diets but guess what, plenty of lean kids were eating that way too. There were fat kids who ate exemplary intakes and lean kids too. You could not correlate BMI and intake.It's partly observer bias. We notice and perhaps judge the fat kid sitting in the cafeteria with tater tots and a soda, and fail to notice the two skinny ones sitting with her eating the exact same thing.Remember, the best predictor of weight gain, even in teen girls is dieting. I just wish this show, adored and watched by so many would be as careful with it's fat stereotpyes as it is with promoting acceptance and diversity in other arenas.Did you notice? What did you think?