Link: Are fears of a fat planet overblown? - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com.
Here we go, a compendium of all the issues various skeptics have raised concerning the so-called "obesity epidemic." The first page of the article mainly covers various contrarian opinions and studies, including the infamous "obesity paradox" in which researchers grudgingly admit that fat people actually survive some conditions better than thin people. But it's the second page where things really get down and dirty--where the article starts following the money to see who stands to profit from the war on obesity--and who might even be feuling the war to benefit their own bottom lines:
"Experts on both sides of the obesity debate have often criticized WHO's overweight and obesity measures, saying they are too low. When WHO defined the body mass index scores constituting normal, overweight and obese, they appeared to be the result of an independent expert committee convened by WHO. Yet the 1997 Geneva consultation was held jointly with the International Obesity Task Force, an advocacy group whose self-described mission is "to inform the world about the urgency of the (obesity) problem." According to the task force's most recent available annual report, more than 70 percent of their funding came from Abbott Laboratories and F. Hoffman La-Roche, companies which make top-selling anti-fat pills."
Obviously, there are indeed health benefits to taking off a reasonable amount of weight in a reasonable way--I'm proof of that. But the so-called War on Obesity, as far as I can see, is not about reasonable (let alone inexpensive) approaches to the problem. It's about scare tactics, knee-jerk rejection of data that doesn't fit the official party line, and big profits for the medical, pharmaceutical, and diet industries.
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