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