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ABSTRACT
Americans' recent weight gains have been widely described as an "obesity epidemic." Such a characterization, however, has many problems: the average American weight gain has been relatively low (eight to 12 pounds over the last 20 years), and the causal linkages between adiposity, morbidity, and mortality are unclear. Nevertheless, the media and numerous health officials continue to sound dire warnings that obesity has become an epidemic disease. In this article, I examine how and why America's growing weight became an "obesity epidemic." I find the disease characterization has less to do with the health consequences of excess weight and more with the various financial and political incentives of the weight loss industry, medical profession, and public health bureaucracy. This epidemic image was also assisted by the method of displaying information about weight gain with maps in PowerPoint slides. Such characterizations, I argue, are problematic. Given the inconclusive scientific evidence and the absence of a safe and effective weight loss regimen, calling America's growing weight an epidemic disease is likely to cause more harm than good.
RECENTLY, A GROWING CHORUS has been sounding the warnings about an epidemic disease threatening America's health: obesity. Since 1980, the rates of overweight and obesity in the United States have increased dramatically. Today roughly two out of three Americans are considered to "weigh too much" and a quarter are considered "obese." According to the Surgeon General, the secretary of Health and Human Services, and JAMA, this growing weight is an "epidemic disease" that kills hundreds of thousands of people annually, contributes to scores of various pathologies, and threatens to overwhelm America's public health infrastructure. This story has been picked up by most major news outlets, who have run thousands of stories since 1999 on America's "obesity epidemic."
Yet there is a fundamental problem with this characterization: as a disease, obesity is a flawed construct. According to Stedman's Medical Dictionary (2000), a disease is "an interruption, cessation, or disorder of body function, system, or organ." By this definition, if obesity is a disease, then we must assume that, at some level, body fat is pathological. However, there is no clear evidence about what level or even how, exactly, adipose tissue is harmful to our health. For some extremely heavy...