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The Obesity Myth The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health by Paul Campos Gotham Books, 2004 288 pp. $17.00

My husband and I have an airline mantra that we strictly adhere to: "Don't give up the armrest." Which means: when the person sitting next to you asks if he or she might please raise the armrest, our response is a courteous but firm "no." Why? Because most often the person asking is obese and cannot squeeze his plump derrière into the space allotted by the airlines. My husband and I reason that we paid for a full seat, and in the past, we've experienced the uncomfortable effect of someone else's spillage causing us to sit knock-elbowed the entire flight. And to be embarrassingly truthful, such encounters often lead to disgusted dialogue once we're safely out of the plane: "How can he live that way? Does he know how he looks? What a lack of self-control!" Paul Campos, the author of The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health, would like to strangle us. Americans have created a false and unfounded hysteria about fat in general, Campos argues, and obese people are one more segment of the population that we have ostracized unfairly. They cannot help who they are. They are programmed to fluctuate around a predetermined genetic weight. And the rest of us who are frantically attempting to look like the slim, sleek magazine models are dieting ourselves to death—literally. Campos identifies study after study in which, he alleges, researchers have erroneously misrepresented and manipulated their data to pinpoint fat as the culprit. Why? Oftentimes, the studies are funded by the very organizations—diet and weight-loss programs—that want us to become obsessed with losing weight.

In medical terms, whether or not a person is obese is determined by the body mass index, or BMI, a measurement of body fat based on height and weight. (To check your own BMI, go to www.nhlbi.nih.gov.) Today, more than 60 percent of Americans are either overweight (BMI >25), obese (BMI >30), or morbidly obese (BMI >40). Generally speaking, a BMI of 19 to 25 indicates a healthy weight.

A particularly compelling study done in 1996 by the National Center for Health Statistics and Cornell University analyzed dozens of previous studies to investigate whether or not the relationship between body weight and mortality was meaningful. The results were startling:

Among non-smoking white men, the lowest mortality rate was found among those with a BMI between 23 and 29, which means that a large majority of the men who lived longest were "overweight" according to government guidelines. The mortality rate for white men in the supposedly ideal range of 19 to 21 was the same as that for those in the 29 to 31 range (most of whom would be defined currently as "obese"). The researchers were sufficiently struck by this to point out that since their analysis of existing studies had found "increased mortality at moderately low BMI for white men comparable to that found at extreme overweight, which does not appear to be due to smoking or existing disease," it followed that "attention to the health risks of underweight is needed, and body weight recommendations for optimum longevity need to be considered in light of these risks."1

Even more astounding was what they found for women. The authors concluded that, for non-smoking, white women, the BMI range correlating with the lowest mortality rate was extremely broad, from around 18 to 32, meaning a woman of average height could weigh anywhere within an 80-pound range without seeing any statistically significant change in her risk of premature death.2

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