Welcome to www.no-obesity-epidemic.org - A voice of Sanity in the world of obesity politics. This website will demonstrate that the so-called "obesity epidemic" is a harmful myth perpetrated on Americans by certain vested interests. This myth is not to be taken lightly. Misinformed government policies, bad advice from authorities, and societal pressures cause millions of individuals to undertake useless and often harmful measures to reduce their weight. This has resulted in serious health problems and deaths, untold psycholgical suffering, unnecessary lifestyle changes, and needless dollars spent by tens of millions of Americans. I invite you to read on so that you will see that the myth of an "obesity epidemic" in America is easily refuted. The Center for Consumer Freedom has published a booklet that disproves several myths concerning obesity. These myths have created a false sense of fear and urgency in the American people. Common Obesity Myths: Obesity Kills 400,000 Americans a Year You Can’t Be Overweight and Healthy Obesity Is a Disease Overeating Is the Primary Cause of Obesity Soda Causes Childhood Obesity 64 Percent of Americans Are Overweight or Obese Obesity Costs the U.S. Economy $117 Billion Annually I became interested in the “obesity epidemic” when I realized that I was attempting to market my eBook: “Common Sense Ways to Save Money on Food: A Resource Guide for Hard Times,” on another website in what I considered to be an adverse environment created by the popular news media. My eBook recommends the purchase of low-cost high-calorie foods, including calorie dense foods, as a way to save money on food. Recommending calorie dense foods is contrary to the advice of many authorities who espouse that such foods are not healthy and lead to weight gain. Even the purchase of low-cost high-calorie foods that are not calorie dense, such as cooked pasta or rice, is rarely mentioned as way to save money on food. It seems that all low-cost high-calorie foods are, by semantic or other means of association, considered to be problematic. I began to read articles on the “obesity epidemic”. I would often ask myself, where are the 64 percent of Americans who have been defined to be overweight or obese? Why don't I see with my own eyes that most Americans appear to be too heavy? I posited that some agreed upon standard for defining the conditions of overweight and obesity must be very strict. How else could this be explained? Perhaps I could be accused of having a conflict of interest because this website deconstructs the "obesity epidemic" while my other website, www.recessionfoodguide.com features a downloadable eBook that recommends low-cost high-calorie foods, some of which are calorie dense. However, when I am in a public venue, I just do not see anything close to 64 percent of adults, nearly 2 out of every 3, to be carrying too much weight. I invite readers of this website to do your own informal study on the frequency of overweight and obesity in adults and children by simply observing people. I believe that you will soon determine that there is, in fact, no "obesity epidemic". Often, simple direct observation will give a more accurate view than published numbers do. I am not denying that obesity can be a problem, I am challenging the scope of the problem as defined by the government and various interest groups. The overestimated frequency of overweight and obese individuals is largely a result of an oversimplified and biased assessment tool, the Body Mass Index (BMI). The BMI is biased in several respects. The empirical equation for calculating BMI uses an incorrect power relationship between body weight (mass) and height; BMI limits for the overweight and obesity categories are arbitrary and overly strict, especially in children; and BMI does not account for differences in body composition or somatotype (body type). It is true that there has been a moderate increase in the average weight of American adults in the latter part of the 20th century. This increase has leveled-off for several years now even though many authorities will not admit it. However, informal observation demonstrates that not even close to 64 percent of Americans carry too much weight. Authorities have been claiming that the number of obese children has increased dramatically over the past few decades, and speak in terms of a "childhood obesity epidemic" almost as if it were separate from the "obesity epidemic" affecting the entire population. American children have being placed under enormous pressure to lose weight and change to eating more "healthy" foods. As though they were little adults, children are being conditioned to fear obesity, worry about their body image, worry about their health, and are being made give up their favorite foods for "healthier" ones. According to Dr. Jon Robison, however, average caloric intake by children has actually declined in recent years. How can the rate of childhood obesity be increasing when their caloric intake is actually less? A few paragraphs hence, I discuss how the Body Mass Index tends to overassess obesity in children to even a greater degree than in adults. For today's children, the natural, enjoyable process of eating has been turned into a matter of grave concern - something to be studied, manipulated, and continually improved on. It did not take to long for me to learn that the "obesity epidemic" is a fiction. Dealing with this fiction has caused widespread problems for Americans. What is the interest in misleading Americans? There are various reasons. The anti-obesity industry is a 60 billion dollar behemoth involving governmental officials and agencies, various non-profits, physicians, obesity researchers, bariatric surgeons, pharmaceutical companies, weight-loss clinics, a diet food industry, and a physical fitness industry. There is a major profit incentive driving the obesity epidemic and the field of major players includes some who have incurred substantiated conflicts of interest. There is also the matter of American cultural premiums on ambition, will power, and morality. Many people incorrectly assume that obese individuals lack these traits. Recent evidence has been pointing to the fact obesity is largely based on factors beyond our willful control. It is a fact that 95% of dieters will regain their weight. In my opinion, ambition, will power, and morality have been emphasized to such a lop-sided extent that the quest for attainment of these traits has become a burden on our culture. One does not have to look hard to see that strong ambition causes stress, burnout, intolerance of those who are less ambitious, and a movement away from commonly practiced ethical principles. Will power is no more than a conscious and temporary abeyance of our natural drive for comfort. A recent article in the New York Times demonstrates that the mental energy required to practice will power is limited and is depleted after the first application. As for morality, how many times do we hear moral admonitions coming from people in power; the same people who have aided and abetted the destruction of our economy, the same people who have given 46 trillion of our dollars to big banks and wealthy investors and then turn around to impose "shared sacrifice" through a mandate of austerity on those who are barely surviving, the same people who will lock you away for smoking marijuana and then go home and enjoy the same pleasure. I posit one more reason for the “obesity epidemic” and its surrounding politics. Our government appears to display a significant interest in helping Americans to become healthier and more attractive through an emphasis on weight loss. At the same time the government is legislating "ham handed" policies that are destroying the middle class, dismantling the safety net, and nullifying our rights guaranteed in the Constitution. On the surface, there seems to be quite a descrepancy between these attitudes. Not really. In its emphasis to have us attain sleek bodies, our government is, consciously or unconsciously, trying to burden the American populace with superfluous concerns and unattainable goals to divert our attention away from the deepening political and economic crises. Largely unsucessful efforts at weight loss, as well as successful efforts that require superhuman willpower sap energy from individuals so they are less able to fend for themselves as needed. People who have poor self-esteem due to an inability to lose weight; people who are taught to hate their bodies; people whose energies are constantly diverted toward impossible quests; people conditioned not to enjoy food because it is bad for them; these people, namely all of us, have less ability to fight for our inherent human rights. And our rights are being stolen from us right under our noses. When I initially wrote this web page in June 2011, I reported that Homeland Security czar, Janet Napolitano had the audacity to ask Americans to spy on other Americans using Walmart as a testing ground. I posted a link to an obscure Youtube video with Janet Napolitano giving her orders. I had removed the link as it would have made this website a target for removal under the previously pending SOPA (Stop Internet Piracy Act) legislation which was another major attack on our freedom. I made the ominous assertion that such a policy can degrade into a state of paralyzing distrust in which one's own child or best friend could be a spy for the government. This is highly reminiscent of conditions in the pre-1989 Soviet dictatorship. At that time the Soviets were considered to be arch enemies of the United States. Well we are probably not being spied on yet, but in the beginning of 2012, President Obama and the Congress took a large step in the direction of devolving the United States into military state by passing the National Defense Authoriaztion Act of 2012. This law contains a provision that allows for indefinite detention of American citizens living on America soil at the whim or the President or the military. Is it just a coincidence that President Obama’s wife has taken up the cause of fighting a non-existent “childhood obesity epidemic?" Maybe it is and maybe it is not. If you go to a public venue, you will not find that many children who could be deemed to be carrying too much weight. The vast majority of American children do not have a weight problem but they are being made to fear the consequences eating. Numerous children are now developing body image problems and eating disorders as well as taking on unnecessary worries about their health. When it comes to the childhood obesity epidemic "the emperor is truly wearing no clothes." On the webpage "How the BMI Overestimates Obesity," I demonstrate how the so-called "childhood obesity epidemic" may be entirely attributable to flaws in the Body Mass Index assessment tool. This includes demonstrating on a mathematical basis that the BMI limits that denote obesity in children are too low. It also discusses how historical trends of increasing stature in children automatically result in higher BMIs for children of a given age, even though BMI limits denoting overweight and obesity have not been revised to account for this. Click here to read this material. Emphasis on a non-existent “obesity epidemic” in not to be sloughed off as a nuisance to Americans, it is an serious assault on our freedom, dignity and well-being. The so-called “obesity epidemic” has resulted in deflecting emphasis away from the growing problem of food insecurity and hunger in America. There are over 48 million food insecure families in the United States. Instead of recommending the purchase of low-cost high-calorie foods, there are calls to tax high calorie foods to reduce one's incentive to purchase calorie dense foods that are presumed to cause obesity. High calorie foods cost only one-tenth as much as fruits and vegetables on a per calorie basis. Purchasing foods with low-cost calories is a simple and effective way to reduce hunger, yet it is never recommended. Authorities place major emphasis on what is mostly a cosmetic problem, while minimizing emphasis on food insecurity and hunger. I find this to be exasperating. The United States government has spent two million dollars to develop an update to the Food Pyramid. In the form of a logo, called MyPlate, we are given instructions how to portion our eating into four food groups, Grains, Fruits, Vegetables, and Proteins. MyPlate recommends that Americans make one-half of their diets fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables can be an important components of our diets. However, I reemphasize the fact that the calories provided by fruits and vegetable cost 10 times more than the calories provided by low-cost high-calorie foods including calorie dense foods. Poor people and many in the declining middle class cannot begin to afford to make one-half of their diets fruits and vegetables. The same government that promotes a more expensive eating style has been simultaneously working to reduce Food Stamp and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) benefits by 20 percent. With the Democrats now agreeing with the Republican's on imposed austerity, you can be assured that further substantial benefit reductions will be made. A new Children's Nutrition program, strongly promoted by the First Lady, had frightenend many anti-hunger groups because it was to be payed for by reductions in Food Stamp benefits. Such an adverse compromise is still on the table. One does not have to look far to see duplicity in our government's food policy. Corporate groups with interests that are divergent to the interests of Americans were given much input in the creation of MyPlate. This led to the inclusion of dairy foods as a category that is not included on the plate in the logo but next to it. Such an effort, just to appease the dairy industry, adds unnecessary complexity to the logo as well as a degree of ambiguity to its interpretation. From a nutritional perspective, dairy foods are not a necessity, they can be replaced by other foods that supply fats and proteins. The creators of MyPlate also tried to be nutritionally politically correct by having a portion on MyPlate designated "Protein" even though such usage is inconsistent with the other portions which are all based on food types. Much of our protein comes from non-standard sources such as grains. Since "Grains" are also a category on the MyPlate logo, our government is now over-promoting protein intake by having it represented in two of the four main categories on the MyPlate logo. A high protein diet has been shown to have an adverse effect on the kidneys. The following example shows just how science related to obesity has been abjectly politicized. False results and conclusions serve as a basis for unnecessary and harmful policies and actions. An article in the February 11, 2010 issue of the New York Times "Child Obesity Risks Death at Early Age, Study Finds," opens with the statement: "A rare study that tracked thousands of children through adulthood found the heaviest youngsters were more than twice as likely as the thinnest to die prematurely, before age 55, of illness ...". I consider this to be a serious indictment of childhood obesity, one that should be taken seriously if true. I obtained the original research paper and analyzed the methodology, results, and discussion to determine whether this frightful attribution to childhood obesity is of substance. I remind my readers that if you go out and observe you will find childhood obesity to be uncommon, this knowledge should overlay the following discussion. I have had much experience evaluating research papers as a graduate student at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). I obtained a Ph.D. in pharmaceutics and worked in drug research for 5 years. One thing that I had learned in my seven years at UCSF was to not trust the validity of a research paper without first exploring it on my own. This paper in question, like a majority peer reviewed papers published in scientific journals, turned out to be problematic in a number of ways. The research paper reported results inconsistently, doing so with the number of deaths from diabetes as well as with several less important issues. It employed Body Mass Index as a measure of obesity even though BMI is a poor surrogate for body fat. The study employed a non-representative population of study subjects, Native Americans from the Pima and Tehono O'odham Tribes who tend to be morbidly obese as adult due to genetic factors. Pima Native Americans (for simplicity, I will refer to Pimas and Tehono O'odham Native Americans collectively as Pimas) have markedly short life expectancies. The endpoint used to determine the effect of childhood obesity on health was early deaths. This was a poor choice, not only because the Pimas normally have a short life expectancy (47 years by one source), but also because Native Americans who live on reservations are subject to a high rate of alcoholism related deaths, suicides, accidental deaths, murders, and other sources of early death. In the study, such deaths overwhelmed the number of obesity related deaths. The study was finalized 20 years too early to obtain adequate mortality statisitcs. The average age on followup was approximately 35 years while the definition of early mortality used in the study was 55. There were many minor problems in procedure and interpretation as well. Click here if you wish to read further details of the study. Two particular factors, emphasized in the New York Times article are very misleading. First, it was inferred that the Pima Native American experience of increased obesity with a high degree of associated morbidity and mortality may portend a similar occurence in other Americans. Pima Native Americans have a very different genetic makeup than Americans of all other races, one that had enabled them to handle a scarcity of food by a very efficient utilization of calories. Their bodies were overwhelmed by their new Americanized diets when they had to switch from a very physical agrarian existence to living on reservations. Most Pima Native Americans normally end up morbidly obese as adults and as many as 80% develop Type 2 diabetes. The recent average weight gain in Americans is nothing close to what the Pima's have experienced. Second, there is much fearmongering about childhood Type 2 diabetes which is extremely rare despite concerns of a childhood obesity epidemic. Glucose intolerance in children is much overplayed. It is seen in 7% of children, even though less than 0.1% of children develop Type 2 diabetes. These numbers show how it is misleading to conflate the condition of glucose intolerance with pre-diabetes as is done in the article and elsewhere. Millions of readers of the New York Times are misled by such articles. Policymakers in the government and other organizations take the reported 2.3-fold higher death rate in Pima adults who were obese as children at face value, even though the study had major flaws. Misinformed policies are inevitable when based upon spurious results. Since the results fit our government's agenda to hype a non-existent childhood obesity epidemic, how could anyone expect politicians to be concerned with the obviously poor scientific quality of the results and conclusions from the study? On June 20, 2011, ABC news highlighted a story describing a 2009 University of Central Florida study that found that nearly half of the 3- to 6-year-old girls surveyed said they worried about being fat. This is a burden placed unnecessarily on America children by relentlessly pontificating anti-obesity crusaders. American children, especially girls, are being set up for a lifetime burden of severe body image and self-esteem problems that will result in numerous cases of bulemia and anorexia. I ask our government, please leave us alone until you have correctly defined a problem and come up with reasonable approaches to solving it. Similarly, Radley Balko states, in his introduction to an article on childhood obesity by Dr. Jon Robison: “A recent report in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology says that girls as young as five years old are beginning to have problems with body image. The authors concluded that the girls "felt 'paranoid' about their weight - partly because of the Government's anti-obesity message," according to the London Telegraph. Girls as young as eight are being diagnosed with eating disorders." The situation is no different in the United States. I add here that Type 2 Diabetes is very rare in children
with an incidence rate of 4.9 per
10,000 children under the age of 20. For children of 10 years
old and below, onset of Type 2 Diabetes is extremely rare, with an
annual onset of 0.4 per 100,000.
Mr.
Balko continues, "If we crunch the available data on eating
disorders
(with data from the National Institute of Mental Health) versus the
number of children who have Type 2 Diabetes (the most common ailment
associated with childhood obesity -- data comes from the Center for
Disease Control) we find that the average child today is somewhere
between 222 and 1,097 times more likely to have an eating disorder than
Type 2 Diabetes.”
In other words, to prevent one case of Type 2 diabetes in children, authorites will sacrifice up to 1,000 people to eating disorders such as bulemia and anorexia. Nutritionists and other authorities have used the popular media to hype their concerns about "junk foods" and the "obesity epidemic." However many ignore the fact that there are over 48 million food insecure individuals in the United States. The tragedy is that dieting and other interventions rarely work to reduce one’s weight over the long run. In fact, often they cause great harm. On the other hand, the problem of food insecurity can be dealt with and alleviated using relatively simple approaches such as promoting the purchase low-cost high-calorie foods instead of insisting that we purchase more high-cost fruits and vegetables. Increasing Food Stamp and WIC benefits rather than taking them away would be of great help to Americans as well. Food insecure children suffer major developmental, psychological, and educational problems that lead to a lifetime of problems. In a tragic paradox, it is well substantiated (see page 16 of linked article) that low birth weight infants, who are more common in food insecure mothers end up with a very high incidence of childhood obesity. Where is Michelle Obama, anti-obesity crusader in children, when it comes to defending WIC against cuts? J. Eric Oliver is author of the well-written, informative book, "Fat Polics: The Real Story Behind the Obesity Epidemic". As a post-doctoral fellow at Yale University, he had set out to learn about and do research on some political aspects of the "obesity epidemic". Feeing a disillusionment that was probably similar to mine, he soon discovered that the so-called "obesity epidemic" does not exist. Fortunately, he followed through on his revised understanding and wrote "Fat Politics" a comprehensive work that debunks the "obesity epidemic" from many angles. I would like to include a salient passage quoted from pages 11 and 12 of his book. J. Eric Oliver writes: "Ask any of the millions of frustrated dieters in America and they will tell you what molecular biologists have long known -- for many of us, our bodies are quite resistant to being slender. Nor do we have a safe of effective mechanism for helping us lose weight. Indeed, the same doctors, health officials, and medical researchers who have spent the past four decades telling Americans they are too fat have not been able to devise a sound treatment for becoming thin. As a result many Americans are going to extreme measures to make themselves lose weight, such as self-starvation, smoking, taking dangerous appetite suppressants, or even having their stomachs surgically shrunk. Not only are such practices ineffective, they often do more harm than good. Whether it is from a failed diet, a botched gastric-bypass surgery, complications from an eating disorder, or heart damage from diet drugs, every year thousands of Americans are literally dying to be thin." Continuing, author J. Eric Oliver writes: "Thus with respect to our weights, we have put ourselves into a bind. In calling our growing weight an 'epidemic,' we have created a disease out of a physical symptom that, in turn, we are unable to treat. In calling fat people gluttonous and lazy, we are ascribing moral characteristics to what is largely a biological phenomenon, We are now being told to lose weight without understanding that out fatness is actually an expression of forces that are largely beyond our individual control or our collective will to change. From the misguided equation of thinness and health, millions of Americans are being told to lose weight, which is only likely to make them more miserable and possbly do them great harm." |