Questioning The Obesity Myth

The Fleshiness Myth: Why United States's Obsession with Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health. Gotham Books, New York, 2004. At a June 2, 2005, press conference, Dr. Julie Gerberding, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, apologized for the mixed messages the populace has been getting approximately the dangers of fleshiness. Acknowledging that flawed data in several CDC studies had exaggerated the risks of , Gerberding was responding in part to critics such as Saint Paul Campos. Campos rightly sounds the alarm over bad skill, and his volume The Myth (reissued in May 2005 as The Diet Myth) was prominently featured in a recent Scientific American cover clause.

The Bible and controversy provide an object lesson in skepticism. Campos is not a checkup professional but a lawyer; he makes a point of mentioning this, implying that his status as an outsider to the issuance aids his judgment. It is important to remember, however, that lawyers do not seek the truth; instead, they advocate for one side. In this case, Campos is advocating on behalf of those who believe that the efforts to portray fatness as unhealthy and unacceptable ar driven by debris scientific discipline, hatred of blubber people, and a profit-hungry dieting industry. He also believes that the time-honored free weight loss recipe of watching what you eat and exercising doesn't work. Campos charges that "almost everything the government and the media [] saying close to exercising weight and weighting control [is] either grossly distorted or flatly untrue." The whole field is rife with "dust ," Campos writes, and former Operating surgeon Full general Jacques Louis David Satcher was "brainsick" in his efforts to curb US's .

It is certainly true, as Dr. Gerberding admitted (and Patrick Johnson explains in this publication), that assorted estimates of 's death toll were consistently overdone. While Campos and other critics can gloat in vindication, the fact is that is only the latest in a long list of world threats that have been by a sensationalist news media (and, to a lesser degree, by the medical checkup community). The dire warnings, publicity, and hype surrounding West Nile virus, ebola, flu, anthrax, Mad Cow disease, and even AIDS, to name just a few, all far outstripped any reasonable threat. And confusing and contradictory medical examination information is hardly novel, as William Baarschers describes in his in this exit.