Our Tax Dollars At Work: Feds Spend $1.5 Million to Study Why Lesbians Are Fat

[Dave]

They can cancel tours of the White House due to the sequester but more then willing to give money to a research project that will really do nothing when its done. Basically we will all find out that lesbians are fat because they eat to much. Not much else will come of this mighty study.

I'm so happy that our government knows exactly where to spend our money at.

(CNSNews.com) – The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $1.5 million to study biological and social factors for why “three-quarters” of lesbians are obese and why gay males are not, calling it an issue of “high public-health significance."

Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mass., has received two grants administered by NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to study the relationship between sexual orientation and obesity.

“Obesity is one of the most critical public health issues affecting the U.S. today,” the description of the grant reads. “Racial and socioeconomic disparities in the determinants, distribution, and consequences of obesity are receiving increasing attention.”

“[H]owever, one area that is only beginning to be recognized is the striking interplay of gender and sexual orientation in obesity disparities,” it states. “It is now well-established that women of minority sexual orientation are disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic, with  it continues.

“In stark contrast, among men, heterosexual males have nearly double the risk of obesity compared to gay males.”

The investigators say there has been “almost no” research devoted to this disparity, and they have set out to find the biological, psychological, and social factors behind it.

The project is being led by S. Bryn Austin, Director of Fellowship Research Training in the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. Austin is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health, and an Associate Epidemiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), which is a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.

BWH first received a $778,622 grant for the study in 2011, followed by a $741,378 grant in 2012, totaling $1,520,000. The project has the potential to be a five-year study.

The grants list a “project end date” and a “budget end date” of June 30, 2016. The researchers said the subject is one of “high public-health significance.”

However, the NICHD said the future of the project is uncertain because of the sequester--automatic spending cuts that took effect on March 1.

"The NIH is currently assessing the impact on funding due to sequestration," said Robert Bock, Press Officer for the NICHD.  "It is not possible to say how this (or any other NIH grant) will be affected in the long term beyond the 90 percent funding levels already in place."

"Obesity is a serious public health problem affecting a large proportion of the U.S. population,"  Bock said.  "The study is examining reasons why the risk of obesity varies according to sexual orientation, in order to inform the development of future strategies to prevent obesity."

The researchers said the subject is one of “high public-health significance.”

“It will be impossible to develop evidence-based preventive interventions unless we first answer basic questions about causal pathways, as we plan to do,” they said. “Our study has high potential for public health impact not only for sexual minorities but also for heterosexuals, as we seek to uncover how processes of gender socialization may exacerbate obesity risk in both sexual minority females and heterosexual males.”

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/feds-spend-15-million-study-why-les...

[Willy]

I heard about this on talk radio. Amazing waste of money.

[easymoney]

Does anyone really care?

[XLFD]

Maybe the correlation mentioned is something as simple as men desire their sex partners to be slim, whereas, women are not hung up on the body shape of their sex partners.  That's how it is in the heterosexual community, I doubt it would vary if their preference was for the same sex. 

As it is, there is so much variance among people that whatever results from this study will likely be inconclusive, except that a lot of money was wasted for naught but nonsense.

[Willy]

This study is just another excuse to say that lesbians are being discriminated against and to show proof they'll pull out the fat photos to show how disturbed they are. This study really only shows how much gay women love their twinkies. The study will conclude that if we accept the lesbians and let them get married then they will stop growing in width and become a thinner more happy lover of women.

Or it could be that because they are fat that men won't pay any attention to them so they set their sites on other ladies.

[easymoney]

This is just another person, who came up with an idea for a study, and the Gov. loves to fund these types of things.

I remember back in the 70's a guy got 100,000 dollars to study grin patterns at a bowling alley, it's the same $hit, no-one really cares. The Gov. just likes to throw money down an endless hole.

I couldn't believe the stupidity then, and I can't now.