http://www.obesitymyth.com/excerpt.html

Introduction

Is your weight hazardous to your health? According to America’s public
health authorities, there’s an 80% chance that it is. From the Surgeon
General’s office, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes
of Health, and our leading medical schools, America’s anti-fat warriors are
bombarding us with dire warnings: According to such sources, no less than
four of every five Americans maintain a medically dangerous body mass
(nearly two-thirds of us are said to be overweight, while almost half of
the rest of the nation is categorized as too thin).

If these claims sound implausible, there’s a very good reason why: because
they’re false. Indeed, given that Americans are enjoying longer lives and
better health than ever before, the claim that four out of five of us are
running serious health risks because of our weight sounds exactly like the
sort of exaggeration that can produce a cultural epidemic of fear, bearing
no relation to any rational assessment of risk.

On the other hand, given the pervasiveness of America’s fear of fat, it’s
only natural that many readers will react skeptically to a claim that this
fear has no real medical or scientific justification. For one thing, it is
always disturbing to acknowledge that authoritative social institutions can
and sometimes do seriously mislead the public: At some level everyone would
like to be able to trust our culture’s experts and authority figures when
they claim to know what’s best for us. Indeed, when I began researching
this topic five years ago, I assumed the fact that being “overweight” was a
serious health risk was so well established that this aspect of the subject
was hardly worth discussing. Yet in the course of plowing through dozens of
books, hundreds of articles in medical journals, and countless interviews
with medical and scientific experts, I discovered that almost everything
the government and the media were saying about weight and weight control
was either grossly distorted or flatly untrue.

What I discovered was that a host of eminent doctors, scientists, eating
disorder specialists, psychologists, sociologists, and other critics of
America’s obsession with weight and weight loss have concluded that
“overweight” and “obesity” are not primarily medical issues at all. In the
wake of a century’s worth of unsuccessful attempts to find a cure for the
“disease” of a higher-than-average weight, a diverse and distinguished
group of critics has come to see weight in America as primarily a cultural
and political issue. Indeed these opponents of the war on fat have
subjected the supposed medical justifications for that war to devastating
criticisms. Such critics point out that there is nothing new about either
America’s “obesity epidemic,” or the public health warnings it inspires.
For more than fifty years now, government officials have been making the
same dire predictions concerning the public health calamity that is about
to befall us as a consequence of the nation’s expanding waistline (as long
ago as the 1950s, nearly half of America’s adult population was supposedly
overweight)... SNIP