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Campos: Buying off scientists to shout 'Obesity!'

Published October 3, 2006 at midnight

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BARCELONA - I'm attending a gala luncheon at the World Nutrition Conference. In this case the nutrition is being provided by a trendy Spanish chef, inside the great hall of what used to be a palace of the kings of Spain, but is now the Catalan national art museum.

Such swank surroundings almost impel a globe-trotting pundit on an expense account to take on the intonations of the Apostle to the Middlebrows, by deploying an incomprehensible analogy (The Toyota and the Salt Cod?) while speculating about some confusing international situation, before concluding that things should be clearer in six months.

Instead I listen to the guest on my right explain what's really going on here. A well-known scientist, she has been to many a gala luncheon in her time, and her cynicism could startle even a lawyer.

"The point of all this is to buy us off," she tells me. By "us" she means the scientific community, and the item she believes is being purchased is the community's consensus opinion on various matters of economic interest to transnational corporations.

Specifically, she believes the pharmaceutical industry is conducting a highly successful campaign to transform so-called "overweight" and "obesity" into diseases that require treatment. She describes how last month the drug companies bought a bunch of first-class airline tickets to Australia, and put up a gaggle of doctors and scientists in a luxury hotel in Sydney, where they were paid handsome speaking fees to speculate on what could be done about the "global pandemic of obesity," as one of them put it.

"They gave talks about getting kids to watch less TV, getting soda out of the schools, making office workers take the steps instead of the elevator, and convincing people to not drive as much," she tells me. "The drug companies just laugh. They know perfectly well none of that stuff is going to work."

What the pharmaceutical industry is doing, she explains, is subtly and not-so-subtly manipulating expert opinion, for the purpose of softening up the regulatory process that even now is beginning to evaluate the next generation of weight- loss drugs.

It is, when you think about it, an extraordinarily good investment. When it comes to the world of legal bribery, academics are notoriously cheap dates. Fly us to a scenic location, feed us a few fancy meals, and throw in a flamenco dance or two, and the next thing you know the "experts" are all getting with the program.

In this case, the program is to keep repeating the word "obesity" over and over again, like some sort of pseudo-scientific mantra, even though, as my dinner companion points out, there's hardly any evidence that the increasing weight of the population is actually a health problem, and no evidence that the public health establishment's current definition of what makes a person "overweight" makes any sense whatsoever.

"Do you realize," she asks me, "that in the United States somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of everyone in their 50s, in every ethnic group, is supposedly overweight?" I do realize this, but I'm enjoying hearing somebody besides myself rant about the absurdity of such things for a change.

"What sort of sense does it make to classify a normal physical characteristic of an entire population as a disease?" she asks. "Especially when the people with this characteristic live longer than everyone else!" I just laugh, and observe that the creme brulee which has appeared before us is superb.

Naturally, the doctors and scientists profiting from this situation deny their opinions are being bought and sold. More particularly, they sincerely believe their scientific beliefs are immune to economic influence. But a glance at the data they manipulate refutes their belief. On this subject, we're currently in the grip of a global pandemic of "free" creme brulee.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. Reach him at .