Scientific American did a great job in June summarizing the debate on obesity and health (via Paul Campos). Some worthwhile quotes:

  • “By the same criteria we are blaming obesity for heart disease,” [J. Eric] Oliver
    writes [in Obesity: The Making of an American Epidemic], “we could accuse smelly clothes, yellow teeth or bad breath for
    lung cancer instead of cigarettes.”
  • Counterintuitively, “underweight, even though it occurs in only a tiny
    fraction of the population, is actually associated with more excess
    deaths than class I obesity,” says Katherine M. Flegal, a senior
    research scientist at the CDC. Flegal led the study, which appeared in
    the Journal of the American Medical Association on April 20 after
    undergoing four months of scrutiny by internal reviewers at the CDC and
    the National Cancer Institute and additional peer review by the
    journal.
  • “H. L. Mencken once said that for every complex problem there is a
    simple solution–and it’s wrong,” [the Cooper Institute‘s Steven] Blair muses. “We have got to stop
    shouting from the rooftops that obesity is bad for you and that fat
    people are evil and weak-willed and that the world would be lovely if
    we all lost weight. We need to take a much more comprehensive view. But
    I don’t see much evidence that that is happening.”

 Among the other points in the article are that dieting doesn’t work and that, as Blair noted, “[A]t least 2.5 hours per week of walking for exercise during follow-up
seemed to decrease the risk of diabetes by 63 to 69 percent, largely
independent of dietary factors and BMI.”