[lbo-talk] Some Americans OK With Being Fat

Miles Jackson cqmv at pdx.edu
Thu Jan 12 13:34:39 PST 2006


Sujeet Bhatt wrote:


>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/11/AR2006011101397.html
>
>Survey: Some Americans OK With Being Fat
>
>By CANDICE CHOI
>The Associated Press
>Wednesday, January 11, 2006; 8:51 PM
>
>With about two-thirds of U.S. adults overweight, Americans seem more
>accepting of heavier body types, researchers say. The NPD survey of
>1,900 people representative of the U.S. population also found other
>more relaxed attitudes about weight and diet.
>
>
Two-thirds of us are overweight? I suspect they must be using some arbitrary standard of "thinness" and labelling everybody else "overweight". If we define overweight in terms of health risk and life expectancy, it is not true that 2/3 of Americans are overweight: in fact, epidemiologists have recently reported that people who are labelled "slightly overweight" (bmi around 25-30) have a longer life expectancy than those labelled "healthy weight" (bmi around 20-25). Why label healthy people with long lives "overweight"? --A political question. (And the immensely profitable diet and "health" industry makes a vulgar Marxist explanation pretty compelling.)

Miles



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