Dim as a fat microcosm?

[rainyday]

I was just reading another thread where Grey1969 cited research showing body shape has a bearing on disease. It made me wonder how researchers came to figure that out, where they found a study population, etc. Then I started thinking about how this site is unique in its concentration of fat people. In the general population, fat folk are pretty randomly spread about and it must be difficult for researchers to find large sample sizes in one place--especially supersize people--to do this kind of research. Yet here we all are--a huge concentration of various sizes of fat all in one place.

It makes me wonder if there's some way we ourselves could take advantage of this concentration to learn more about fat. No doubt as a population we're not an entirely random sample and there would be biases in certain directions, but we might be able to find some broad patterns that haven't been noted before.

I don't have anywhere specific I'm going with this, and I'd hate to see information gathered that could be used against fat, since there's already plenty of that. I'm just wondering if there aren't commonalities, especially about health, that we'd notice and find interesting or informative for ourselves--or that might even improve our lives. Maybe through anonymous polls or something.

Consider this just "thinking out loud."

 

[grey1969]

 

[missaf]

 

[SoVerySoft]

 

[sunandshadow]