SCHOLARLY ARTICLE- Overweight and Obesity: Is the Epidemic real ?

National and international health organizations have focused increasingly on a perceived obesity epidemic said to pose drastic threats to public health. Indeed, some medical experts have gone so far as to predict that growing body mass will halt and perhaps even reverse the millennia-long trend of rising human life expectancy.

In our view the available scientific data neither support alarmist claims about obesity nor justify diverting scarce resources away from far more pressing public health issues. This article evaluates four central claims made by those who are calling for intensifying the war on fat:

(1) That obesity is an epidemic

Answer to this claim: The claim that we are seeing an ‘epidemic’ of overweight and obesity implies an exponential pattern of growth typical of epidemics. The available data do not support this claim. Instead, what we have seen, in the US, is a relatively modest rightward skewing of average weight on the distribution curve, with people of lower weights gaining little or no weight, and the majority of people weighing ~3–5 kg more than they did a generation ago.3 The average American's weight gain can be explained by 10 extra calories a day, or the equivalent of a Big Mac once every 2 months. Exercise equivalents would be a few minutes of walking every day. This is hardly the orgy of fast food binging and inactivity widely thought to be to blame for the supposed fat explosion.

(2) That overweight and obesity are major contributors to mortality

Answer to claim: This claim, central to arguments that higher than average body mass amount to a major public health problem, is at best weakly supported by the epidemiological literature. Except at true statistical extremes, high body mass is a very weak predictor of mortality, and may even be protective in older populations. In particular, the claim that ‘overweight’ (BMI 25–29.9) increases mortality risk in any meaningful way is impossible to reconcile with numerous large-scale studies that have found no increase in relative risk among the so-called ‘overweight’,


(3) That significant long-term weight loss is both medically beneficial and a practical goal.

Answer to claim: At present, this claim is almost completely unsupported by the epidemiological literature. It is a remarkable fact that the central premise of the current war on fat—that turning obese and overweight people into so-called ‘normal weight’ individuals will improve their health—remains an untested hypothesis.
One main reason the hypothesis remains untested is because there is no method available to produce the result that would have to be produced—significant long-term weight loss, in order to test the claim.

On the whole, body weight seems like a poor target for public health remediation, particularly in the absence of any safe or effective tools for weight loss. Furthermore, many of the tools that are currently employed towards that end

diet drugs,
weight loss surgery,
eating disordered behaviour,
fad diets and the chronic weight cycling they induce

have serious side effects, up to and including death.