Campos: The weight of evidence

Published May 15, 2007 at midnight

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Gina Kolata's new book Rethinking Thin is a welcome addition to a series of recent publications that have taken on the daunting task of trying to get Americans to think more rationally about the relationship between body weight, dieting and health.

For many years Kolata has written on such issues for The New York Times, where her articles have featured the sort of skepticism often missing from much contemporary journalism about health and medicine.

Rethinking Thin joins, among others, Eric Oliver's Fat Politics, Barry Glassner's The Gospel of Food, and my own book The Obesity Myth in making a number of points that are simultaneously difficult to dispute and completely contrary to conventional wisdom.

All these books cite reams of data that will convince anyone who isn't blinded by prejudice of the following:

First, the health risks associated with higher-than-average weight are greatly exaggerated. Second, claims that weight loss in and of itself improves health are poorly supported by the medical literature. Third, the belief that people can choose to be thin is largely false.

Ironically this third point - which is so well established as a matter of scientific fact that even some of the most shameless "obesity" fearmongers don't bother to deny it - is the hardest to get both the public and our public establishment to accept.

Kolata lays out the case against the nation's multibillion-dollar weight-loss industry with compelling clarity. She shows how a combination of genetic and environmental factors ensure that, no matter how hard they try, most people will stay within a fairly narrow weight range that tends to creep higher with age, before declining somewhat when they get old.

In particular, she emphasizes that most people who are naturally inclined to be fat can only maintain a significantly lower body mass by remaining in a state of semi-starvation. Since the combination of will power and neurotic compulsion necessary to pull this off is fairly unusual, perhaps 19 out of 20 people who lose a significant amount of weight will gain the weight back within a year or two.

All this is, in scientific terms, exceedingly well known. Why then does it seem to make almost no impact on the culture? Both the diet scam artists and their enablers in the public health establishment keep selling, with great success, the following utterly incredible message: Americans are fat because they aren't trying hard enough to be thin.

This claim is about as plausible as the hypothesis that Americans are poor because they don't care enough about being rich. Imagine the absurdity of an argument that the reason there are 50 million poor people in America is because our culture is insufficiently materialistic.

Yet this, in effect, is the claim of our anti-fat warriors: Americans are fat because they don't care enough to make the sacrifices necessary to be thin. Interestingly, it's somewhat difficult to find people of even moderate intelligence and education who can maintain the level of self-satisfied ignorance necessary to believe that poor people "choose" to be poor, yet it's very easy to find such people who accept as self-evident the notion that fat people "choose" to be fat.

This inspires me to point something out to my more liberal readers. Remember that particularly clueless right-wing acquaintance of yours? The one who believes that anybody in America can become rich, because he thinks about poverty in a completely unscientific, anecdotal way, which allows him to treat the exceptional case as typical? The one who can't seem to understand the simplest structural arguments about the nature of social inequality?

The next time you see some fat people and get disgusted by their failure to "take care of themselves," think about your clueless friend.

Paul Campos

Kolata lays out the case against the nation's multibillion-dollar weight-loss industry with compelling clarity.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.

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