Why America's Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health

The Obesity Myth
by Paul Campos, J.D.

When an entire society is told that thinner is better and studies everywhere agree diets don't work, it's time to take a look at the assumptions behind the messages. For better or worse, this happens in Paul Campos' (Jurismania) book The Obesity Myth. Packed full of lengthy discussions of popular studies (particularly the Harvard nurses study), dense chapters run through statistics and conclusions at a breathtaking pace. Campos regularly insists on two points: BMI is basically meaningless, and a variety of media-based sources are contributing to an enormous industry that blends oversized portions with trendy, potentially harmful, diets. He grabs attention to the first claim with early assertions that by BMI standards, Brad Pitt is overweight and George Clooney is obese; more detailed discussion covers how insurance companies developed the BMI tables in their earliest forms and the federal government later tinkered with measurements in a way that accounts for much of the sudden "explosion" in obesity (yes, a BMI chart is included at the end of the book). Repeatedly, Campos rails against media stars whose main qualification is their leanness, questions medical conclusions, and demands that we look at weight as a class issue. Also highlighted is the idea of the diet industry being an extremely powerful political force, which may be at the root of the controversy; the hollering about his sources is likely to be louder than the comments about his accuracy in assessing those sources. As with any highly inflammatory topic, a single book presents only a part of the whole picture — but the myth-busting opinions offered here are an important part of the weight-based discussions.

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).

One goal of this book is to make it clear that several decades' worth of grim prophecies regarding the devastating health consequences of higher-than-average weight have turned out to be spectacularly inaccurate. Another is to explicitly politicize what in fact is a political issue, by expanding America's public debate about weight and weight control to include the opinions of people who do not run weight loss clinics. This isn't a rhetorical exaggeration: It has become routine for government panels charged with the task of making public health recommendations regarding weight to consist exclusively of people who run weight loss clinics.

As a lawyer I thought I had become accustomed to the extent to which people are willing to bend, spindle, and mutilate the truth in the pursuit of their own interests. But nothing could have prepared me for the sheer extent of the distortions that feed America's rapidly intensifying weight hysteria. (Consider that a search of the major media for stories regarding the "obesity epidemic" reveals a twentyfold increase in such stories over the course of the last five years.) This book documents how the current barrage of claims about the supposedly devastating medical and economic consequences of "excess" weight is a product of greed, junk science, and outright bigotry. It blows the whistle on a witch-hunt masquerading as a public health initiative, by exposing the invidious cultural forces that encourage us to hate our bodies if they fail to conform to an arbitrary and absurdly restrictive ideal. And it outlines how we can begin to embrace a saner definition of what constitutes a healthy lifestyle and a desirable body.

I began working on this project, in part, because I suspected a well-known critic of the war on fat (Richard Klein) was on to something when he pointed to "a growing awareness that the whole culture of dieting and rigid exercise is the root cause of the fat explosion." I have since discovered that, as disturbingly accurate as that insight into the perverse paradox at the heart of the war on fat was, the damage wrought by this war goes far beyond its tendency to expand our waistlines. Historically most attempts to marginalize and shame some disfavored class of people have focused on minority groups of one sort or another. The war on fat is unique in American history in that it represents the first concerted attempt to transform the vast majority of the nation's citizens into social pariahs, to be pitied and scorned until weapons of mass destruction can be found that will rid them of their shameful condition. As we shall see, this is a phony war, fought against an enemy that cannot be defeated, because he does not exist.

The rejection of the war on fat is based on a simple principle: that tolerance toward an almost wholly benign form of human diversity is the least we should expect of ourselves, if we wish to lay claim to living in a civilized culture. The war on fat is an outrage to values - of equality, of tolerance, of fairness, and indeed of fundamental decency toward those who are different - that American culture celebrates (often with good reason) as essential features of our nation's character. And in the end nothing could be easier than to win this war: All we need to do is stop fighting it.

The war on fat has especially devastating consequences for women. Indeed, I'm not sure I've ever met an American woman who genuinely likes her body. I don't doubt there are such women in contemporary America (especially among ethnic minority groups). Still, after having interviewed hundreds of women regarding their feelings about food, fat, body image, and what it's like to deal with these issues in America today, I can't say I'm confident I've actually encountered such a person.

The stories these women would tell were always sad, sometimes harrowing, and often appalling. Some of them have been included in this book. I wish I could have included many more: Recently, a young woman from what is considered a privileged background recounted to me, in the course of describing the weight hysteria that dominated the milieu in which she was raised, how a girl she grew up with was never permitted to go on a date without first being weighed by her father. If the number on the scale was too high, she was forced to go jogging before her date arrived.

We live in a culture that tells the average American woman, dozens of times per day, that the shape of her body is the most important thing about her, and that she should be disgusted by it. How can one begin to calculate the full emotional, financial, and physiological toll exacted by such messages? And although women pay the highest price for our national obsession with weight, the cultural hysteria regarding this subject is becoming so intense that, increasingly, men are beginning to show signs of the damage that is done to people when they are told constantly that there is something fundamentally wrong with them.

Whether we are supposedly too fat, or too thin, or too sedentary, or too prone to eat unhealthy food, our medical and governmental authorities never tire of hectoring Americans about our imperfections. Between, on the one hand, our punitive public health nannies, and, on the other, the entrepreneurs who hawk health club memberships, workout equipment, Botox, Viagra, and dozens of similar drugs, as well as thousands of varieties of cosmetics, various sorts of plastic surgery, and most of all a seemingly unlimited parade of diets, each of which promises us the illusion of perpetual youth in the guise of slenderness, we have constructed a culture that ensures that relatively few people will ever be at peace with their bodies.

Copyright © 2004 Paul Campos

About the Author

A professor of law at the University of Colorado and a nationally recognized expert on America's war on fat, Paul Campos is the author of a weekly opinion column that appears in more than forty newspapers nationwide. His articles have appeared in the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe.