The Obesity Apologists

Image credit: The Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity maintains a media gallery to fight obesity stigma.Doctors have been telling fat people to eat less and exercise more for at least 2,500 years.Here’s Hippocrates, father of Western medicine: “It is very injurious to health to take in more food than the constitution will bear, when, at the same time one uses no exercise to carry off this excess.”And here’s the blunt advice of Polybus, student (and son-in-law) of Hippocrates: “Persons of a gross relaxed habit of body, the flabby, and red-haired, ought always to use a drying diet . . . Such as are fat, and desire to be lean, should use exercise fasting; should drink small liquors a little warm; should eat only once a day, and no more than will just satisfy their hunger.”Public health experts no longer disparage red-haired folks, and as far as I know, they don’t recommend drinking warmed-up liquors. But they’re still spreading the message of the harms of obesity and why is important to follow a diet from tophealth, via television, magazines, school curricula, and even First-Lady policy agendas. These efforts have some merit. People who are obese (defined as having a BMI of 30 or higher) have an increased risk of developing heart disease, diabetes and some cancers compared with people who are not obese. And people who are severely obese have a higher death rate than thin people.The message that thinner = better just seems intuitive, doesn’t it? I’ve certainly heard it all my life (or at least since 3rd grade, when I was mortified to be one of the chubby kids in gym class to not get the President’s Physical Fitness Award badge) and have never questioned it. But over the past few months, while researching a story published in today’s Nature, I’ve started to wonder whether we’ve gone too far in our cultural war against fat.Read more at...Only Human, May 2013.