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Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)
Is The Obesity Epidemic An Urban Legend? (Part One)
"By today's beauty standards, of course, Marilyn Monroe was an oil tanker."
Dave Barry
A recent article in Scientific American asks if obesity trends and warnings might be "an overblown epidemic?" (W. Wayt Gibbs, May 23, 2006 Scientific American.com.) In addition, several scholarly books challenge the "rampant obesity" orthodoxy:
- The Obesity Myth by Paul F. Campos (Gotham Books, 2004).
- The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology by Michael Gard and Jan Wright (Routledge, 2005).
- Obesity: The Making of an American Epidemic by J. Eric Oliver (Oxford University Press, August 2005).
- Popular Misconceptions About Diet and Weight Gain by Barry Glassner (2006 by HarperCollins - In press--the title of this book may change).
We have been inundated with varied reports claiming that obesity accounts for more than 300,000 American deaths annually. We've also been told that the trend lines of unprecedented "girth growth" foretell costly epidemics of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and other medical consequences. Can challenges to the prevailing crisis perspective be serious? What about all the government warnings about the dire consequences of current weight trends? Just a few months ago, a "Special Report" in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested the obesity epidemic means "the steady rise in life expectancy during the past two centuries may soon come to an end." Could all this be a gigantic, all-pervasive urban legend on the order of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction?
What exactly IS the challenge to the obesity epidemic orthodoxy and how valid is it? Here is a summary of seven basic challenges described in the Scientific American article. Following this summary, I'll offer my assessment of the real "fat fact" situation.
- Is excess fat, in itself, a serious health risk for most overweight or obese people?
- Do pressures on the mildly overweight to cut calories and lose weight do more harm than good?
- Have some public health officials (for example, the director of the CDCP who stated that the current overweight crisis is a greater threat than influenza or plague were in the Middle Ages) exaggerated the dangers? (Between 1918 and 1919, the flu epidemic killed 40 million worldwide.)
- Is the so-called crisis a ploy by tainted experts subsidized by the weight-loss industry? (A claim made by Julie L. Gerberding of the University of Chicago).
- Are the data deceptive due to arbitrary and unscientific definitions of overweight and obesity?
- Are claims and statistics about obesity consequences distorted, thereby misrepresenting "the complicated realities associated with being fat."
- If "icantdoit" is the reality -- is it not unkind, unfair or maybe even unethical to urge people to maintain a body mass index in the 'healthy weight' range? The author of The Obesity Myth writes, "...genetic differences account for 50 to 80 percent of the variation in fatness within a population...health authorities are giving advice people cannot follow."
In summary, the obesity skeptics claim the alleged exaggerations "perpetuate stigma, encourage unbalanced diets and, perhaps, even exacerbate weight gain" -- and create a disease by labeling it as such.
So, is there an obesity epidemic or not? This essay is long enough. In the next essay, I'll answer the question. Meanwhile, get some exercise and look on the bright side of life.
Domain: physicalSubdomain: nutrition
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