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May 23, 2005

Obesity: An Overblown Epidemic?

A growing number of dissenting researchers accuse government and medical 
authorities--as well as the media--of misleading the public about the 
health consequences of rising body weights

By W. Wayt Gibbs

Could it be that excess fat is not, by itself, a serious health risk for 
the vast majority of people who are overweight or obese--categories that in 
the U.S. include about six of every 10 adults? Is it possible that urging 
the overweight or mildly obese to cut calories and lose weight may actually 
do more harm than good?
Such notions defy conventional wisdom that excess adiposity kills more than 
300,000 Americans a year and that the gradual fattening of nations since 
the 1980s presages coming epidemics of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, 
cancer and a host of other medical consequences. Indeed, just this past 
March the New England Journal of Medicine presented a "Special Report," by 
S. Jay Olshansky, David B. Allison and others that seemed to confirm such 
fears. The authors asserted that because of the obesity epidemic, "the 
steady rise in life expectancy during the past two centuries may soon come 
to an end." Articles about the special report by the New York Times, the 
Washington Post and many other news outlets emphasized its forecast that 
obesity may shave up to five years off average life spans in coming decades.

And yet an increasing number of scholars have begun accusing obesity 
experts, public health officials and the media of exaggerating the health 
effects of the epidemic of overweight and obesity. The charges appear in a 
recent flurry of scholarly books, including 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); and a book on popular misconceptions about diet and weight 
gain by Barry Glassner (to be published in 2006 by HarperCollins).

These critics, all academic researchers outside the medical community, do 
not dispute surveys that find the obese fraction of the population to have 
roughly doubled in the U.S. and many parts of Europe since 1980. And they 
acknowledge that obesity, especially in its extreme forms, does seem to be 
a factor in some illnesses and premature deaths.

They allege, however, that experts are blowing hot air when they warn that 
overweight and obesity are causing a massive, and worsening, health crisis. 
They scoff, for example, at the 2003 assertion by Julie L. Gerberding, 
director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that "if you 
looked at any epidemic--whether it's influenza or plague from the Middle 
Ages--they are not as serious as the epidemic of obesity in terms of the 
health impact on our country and our society." (An epidemic of influenza 
killed 40 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1919, including 675,000 
in the U.S.)

What is really going on, asserts Oliver, a political scientist at the 
University of Chicago, is that "a relatively small group of scientists and 
doctors, many directly funded by the weight-loss industry, have created an 
arbitrary and unscientific definition of overweight and obesity. They have 
inflated claims and distorted statistics on the consequences of our growing 
weights, and they have largely ignored the complicated health realities 
associated with being fat."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The overweight segment of the "epidemic of overweight and obesity" is more 
likely reducing death rates than boosting them.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of those complicated realities, concurs Campos, a professor of law at 
the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the widely accepted evidence that 
genetic differences account for 50 to 80 percent of the variation in 
fatness within a population. Because no safe and widely practical methods 
have been shown to induce long-term loss of more than about 5 percent of 
body weight, Campos says, "health authorities are giving people 
advice--maintain a body mass index in the 'healthy weight' range--that is 
literally impossible for many of them to follow." Body mass index, or BMI, 
is a weight-to-height ratio.

By exaggerating the risks of fat and the feasibility of weight loss, Campos 
and Oliver claim, the CDC, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 
and the World Health Organization inadvertently perpetuate stigma, 
encourage unbalanced diets and, perhaps, even exacerbate weight gain. "The 
most perverse irony is that we may be creating a disease simply by labeling 
it as such," Campos states.

Full article:
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000E5065-2345-128A-9E1583414B7F0000

© 1996-2005 Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.

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