Focus 580; The Obesity Myth: Why Americas Obsession With Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health

If you take a look at the popular media and you look at stories that have to do with health. One of the biggest maybe the biggest story that we have out there today has to do with the Americans and their weight. We are told by a wide range of public health officials everybody from the surgeon general to the CDC to the National Institutes of Health that Americans are too heavy and that if nothing is done that we should expect to see a very significant increase in a number of diseases things like heart disease and cancer and diabetes. This morning in this part of focus 580 will be talking with a guest that says that indeed there there may indeed be some relationship between health and weight but that it's not quite so clear or so dramatic as we are often told. And that this obsession that Americans have with weight may indeed be actually hazardous to our health. That's the subtitle of a book that we'll be talking about this morning the book is titled The Obesity Myth. and our guest this morning is the author his name is Paul Campos.

He's professor of law at the University of Colorado and has written a lot and spoken a lot on America's war on fat. He is the author of a weekly opinion column that appears in more than 40 newspapers nationwide and has contributed articles to a number of publications including The New Republic The Wall Street Journal The L.A. Times USA Today and others. He is here visiting the campus of the University of Illinois will be giving a number of talks just right off. Maybe I'll mention too he will be giving a lecture. On this subject and that will be tonight at 7:30. And this is that the Illinois program for research in the humanities at 8 0 5 West Pennsylvania Avenue on the campus and it is free and open to the public also. Tomorrow on the 9th there will be a book signing in the author's corner of the line a union bookstore at noon. So again if you're interested in meeting him you can stop by there this morning on the program. Questions and comments are welcome to The only thing we ask of

callers is that people just try to be brief and we ask that so that we can keep the program moving getting as many people as possible but of course anyone is welcome to call 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also do have a toll free line that's good anywhere you can hear us and that is 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Thank you very much for being here. It's good to be here. Right at the top what I want to make sure is is we people understand what it is you are not saying as you do make it clear early on in the book The Obesity Myth You are not arguing that there is no relationship between weight and health. But that as I read it you're saying that also people have the message people have gotten is that there is a very direct relationship between weight and health. That being fat will make you sick. And that if you want to be healthy the answer is be thin. And your argument is that in fact that the studies that have been done and we can talk

about in some detail don't don't bear that out. They have their own. Yeah that's correct. The book argues that what we ought to be focusing on to the extent that we ought to be focused on something in terms of public health is not weight but lifestyle and lifestyle has only a very indirect and fairly weak relationship to weight. And the notion that our public health officials are pushing right now that if everybody had a healthy lifestyle everybody would be thin is is is is quite false and in fact quite destructive and dangerous. And it's really unfortunate that we are in the grip of what I think is a moral panic and a form of cultural hysteria in this nation right now. In regard to the notion that everybody ought to try to be thin. Our public health officials have a ridiculously narrow and unscientific scientific definition of what healthy weight consists of. When a person's healthy weight doesn't necessarily have anything to do with another person's healthy weight it's perfectly possible for two people of the same height

to weigh 100 pounds differently from each other and from both for both people to be at the appropriate weight for them. So part of the argument of the Obesity Myth is that we have this essentially false definition of what a healthy weight consists. And we have a society that is obsessed with then this And which produces eating disorder behavior and epidemic proportions and which causes lots of damage to people's health by telling everybody that they're supposed to try to be thin. Let's talk a little bit. You you make the case that or you say that there's sort of three basic points to the case people make about the relationship between weight and health that essentially the first point is that if you want to live longer be thinner that is fed people die sooner than thin people. The second is that there is this relationship between being overweight and various kinds of diseases. And the third is the point that says and the solution to the problem is to get thin. Let's talk about the first point. People will perhaps have gotten used to

hearing about something called the Body Mass Index which is. A way of coming up with a number that's the product of a person's weight and their height so that you get a number that you can focus on. And I think that now isn't that the sort of the ideal number supposed to be about twenty five. Is that kind of like the break point if you're more if your BMI is more than 25 it's probably if you're less than 25 you say you're OK. Well roughly speaking the government says that you're supposed to have a BMI between eighteen point five and twenty four point nine to be quote unquote normal or healthy. There are researchers who are who are even less. Ecumenical than that as it were who said that you should have a BMI between eighteen point five and twenty one point nine which for an average white woman would be between one hundred eight hundred twenty seven pounds. And I just want to emphasize that this is all nonsense. There is no basis whatsoever for thinking that that you have to have a BMI within this narrow range in order to be

healthier or especially that you should try to have a BMI within this narrow range or to be healthy given that first of all the correlation between health and weight is much much weaker than would be indicated by these ridiculously narrow definitions of normal quote unquote or healthy weight. And also especially given that there is not the slightest bit of evidence that if you take people who are larger than average and try to make them thinner this will be beneficial to their health. In fact it seems to be quite detrimental to people's health to try to make them significantly smaller. Then they are and therefore this notion that we are laboring under this misconception that everybody should have try to have a BMI within this narrow so called a normal weight range is very misguided and destructive. I do. I'm sure that there's plenty of evidence when we have plenty of statistical evidence that looks at longevity and weight among other things. When you do that do you find that thin people live longer than heavy people.

I thin people actually do not live longer than heavy people this is one of many misconceptions around this subject. In fact if you want to look at long jet life expectancy as your as your primary definition of health for white Americans the low point of the mortality curve that is the point where people live longest is right on the border between so-called ideal weight and so called overweight that is in the BMI 24 to 25 range well for African-Americans. The low point of the mortality curve is smack in the middle of the overweight range that is between 25 and 30 30 being the definition for so-called obesity. So it's not true that thinner people live longer than heavier people in fact what you end up seeing is that you see a very wide range of weights basically from a BMI in the high 8 teens that is for again for an average white woman about one hundred five hundred ten pounds. To a BMI in the low 30s that is for an average height woman weight of around a hundred eighty one hundred eighty five pounds or so in which there is essentially no

significant difference in life expectancy or what physicians call health workers comorbidity that is the tendency of people to develop diseases. So this notion that thin people have better health than heavier people is to a large extent false and even to the extent that it's true. One of the things that fuels all of this hysteria is the failure to take into account what is known in the epidemiological literature in the science literature as confounding variables. That is to the extent that heavier people do have health problems to what extent is that a proper product of their weight and to what extent is that a product instead of things like activity level socioeconomic status dieting diet drug use weight cycling access to medical care all of these other things which have an enormous effect on health and which have a disproportionate effect on the heavier than average in our society because we have so much discrimination focused on people who are heavier than average. Well let me ask you this because I think that some people might say that yes in truth maybe you

were a little nutty about weight and that the serious problem we have is not so much people who may be way all 185 and someone thinks they should be 175 it's that the problem is the people who. Really should be 175 but weigh 275 for that is that as weight in Americans have sort of crept up over time. Yes the average American is a little heavier. But at the extreme ends of the range we have a lot of people who are very heavy. Is that not a problem for them. Well certainly you can reach levels of weight in which weight seems to become an independent health issue certainly at levels in which mobility gets compromised. But I want to emphasize a couple of things first of all that doesn't involve really a quite small percentage of the population. When you hear that 65 percent of the population is overweight. What that means is that the vast majority of those people are people you know again I use an average white woman as a sort of paradigmatic example. Our people weigh a hundred fifty or one hundred sixty

or one hundred seventy pounds we're not talking about people who are so large that their mobility is significantly compromised. And even to the extent that we are talking about really large people it does not follow that the way to address the health problems of really large people is to try to make them thin. Given that we have absolutely no way of doing this at least no way that is that is reasonably safe and therefore to say well we have to try to make these really large people thin is essentially to say let's try to do something that we can to do and that in the long run is actually destructive I mean most obesity researchers will admit that no there isn't any way to make really large people significantly thinner. So we shouldn't. So what's the point of being focused on doing something which we can't do and whose health advocacy is questionable at best. Let me ask one other question and then we have some some callers and I want to give them a chance to talk about this. The second point that you and setting up these three points to say that generally make these three kinds of arguments having to do with fact and the second is that there is a

relationship between weight and various kinds of diseases. And we have heard and read statements from the surgeon general and from people who are in the public health field saying that we have a serious problem with weight in this country and that we should expect that if we don't do anything that we're also going to see an increase in heart disease and diabetes and cancer. Making the connection between again between being overweight and these diseases. That's something you use a data does not support that. No in fact we just had a news. New statistics released by the National Institutes for Health a couple of days ago for 2003 which showed that life expectancy in the United States at an all time high and continued to increase at a steady rate and furthermore that rates of heart disease and cancer the nation's two biggest killers continue to decline they are at all time lows and getting lower all the time. It's really astonishing that people claim that there is a strong relationship between so-called

overweight and so-called obesity and heart disease and cancer. Given that according to their statistics two thirds of us are dangerously fat. And yet heart disease rates are lower than they've ever been cancer rates are lower than they've ever been Americans are living longer and healthier lives than they ever have before. How so how does this add up the answer is that it doesn't and that if you go look at the statistics the relationship between these conditions and weight is actually quite weak and disappears altogether when you take other factors into account especially activity levels and socioeconomic status. Well just and just again to make sure that people listening understand where you're coming from you. You would I think you would say that if we were in if we want to encourage people to be healthier they should be encouraged to have regular exercise they could should be encouraged to have a healthy diet. They should be discouraged from smoking those sorts of things but that we are concentrating too much on just the one thing. Telling people that well if you want to be. You want to be healthy you should

be thin and the solution to all your health problems is to diet to lose weight. Well I agree that we ought to encourage people to be physically active. I think we should have a little bit of a problem with the word exercise in the sense that I think exercise sounds too sort of formalistic and rigid and compulsory We should definitely try to create social situations in which we make it easier for people to be physically active since being physically active is clearly very beneficial in comparison to being sedentary. And I think we should encourage people to have a healthy and balanced attitude towards nutrition which by the way very much includes not dieting and not obsessing on food and doing all of the things that we're encouraged to do by the weight loss industry in this country and that we have to create social and economic circumstances that make it possible for people to engage in really broadly speaking good nutritional practices about what we should not do is tell people that if they want to be healthy they need to be thin since a that message is false and B even if it were true you can't turn larger than average people into thinner people.

So it's very perverse to be telling people to spend their lives trying to do something that they can't do and which actually wouldn't be beneficial to them if they could do it anyways. Well I get one more question that I promised the people who are who are on hold I will get them. I guess I can understand. The the weight loss industry trying to persuade people that it that they should delay should lose weight. I guess I'm I would expect that people like the surgeon general wouldn't have anything particularly to gain by encouraging people to lose weight other than thinking that that will help Americans to be healthier. I mean why is it if this is if if it's really not true that there's this direct relationship between weight and health and we should encourage people to think a little differently and not be so obsessed with with weight and only weight. Why is it that people in public health are spending so much time. Turning up putting out that message. Well that's a very good question and the answer is a complex there isn't and there isn't any straightforward answer but just very briefly. For three reasons one is because there is an

enormous amount of economic pressure to make Americans be obsessive about their weight there's a 50 billion dollar a year economy that is focused on that and that has political and cultural factors that go beyond the narrow range of the weight loss industry persay. The second reason is because we have an eating disorder culture in which people who have an anorexic frame of mind are examining this data and they're projecting their anorexic neuroses out onto the data and then making recommendations that don't make any sense and in that category I would include. Many public health officials including surgeon generals directors of the CDC etc. and the third reason is that we have a tremendous amount of anxiety in this culture about overconsumption and that anxiety is getting focused on to weight even though weight is one of the most trivial forms of over. Should say calories are one of the most trivial forms of overconsumption that we actually face in the economy so we have a complex set of reasons why people are making really hysterical and unscientific claims on this issue but after all it this isn't a unique phenomenon. I mean if you believe that when the surgeon general tells you that marijuana is a deadly drug that needs to be very

very strongly criminalized because it has such horrible effects on people well that's a completely false claim as well but it certainly doesn't stop our public health authorities from making it constantly. Our guest in this part of focus 580 Paul Campos He's professor of law at the University of Colorado. He's the author of the book The Obesity Myth Why America's obsession with weight is hazardous to your health published by Gotham Books and when will be I think soon out in paperback. Yes it should be out in in May in paperback now. So if you dream the book you can seek it out and questions are welcome. We have several and we'll get right to it here starting with our line number one and this would be a caller in Champaign. Hello. Hello. I think I understand that the speaker is a professor All right is his back. I'm in the house profession and research. Well yes. Well it's a good question. I got into this initially because I was actually doing a conference on the Clinton impeachment and I discovered that there was this tremendous focus on both Bill

Clinton's weight and Monica Lewinsky's weight and I was very curious about that and trying to figure out why were people so obsessive about the bodies and the weight of the people involved in the Clinton impeachment. And what I discovered essentially was what I think of as a kind of whistle blowing project that I have ended up undertaking which is that we are in the grip of this kind of cultural hysteria and moral panic and one of the main points of the book is that weight and body image and related issues have been inappropriately medicalized in this culture. So the claim is made you know you have to trust your doctor about about this issue when in fact your doctor usually somebody who knows very very little about these issues because your doctor is somebody who's an expert in renal failure or lung cancer or dermatology or what have you. And the people who are actually giving advice on this issue are obesity researchers who obviously have an extremely strong vested interest in pathologies in weight and treating it as or higher than average weight and treating it as a disease and B the weight loss industry who obviously are even more

obviously I should say have a tremendously vested interest in turning this into a medical and medical ised issue essential to the public health authorities in this country are telling us that two thirds of us have a disease the disease of weighing too much. The book is I think a very straightforward critique of that claim which is just almost completely false. Now in fact a lot of medical personnel agree with me about that by the way and one of the things that I discovered in my research is that there are many many critics of our way to the hysteria in the health professions and also in many other disciplines sociologists anthropologists political scientists psychologists and especially eating disorder specialists. OK. So you're I'm just trying to understand. How are you qualified to give me advice. Well I'm qualified to give you advice by advising you to actually look at the evidence for yourself and make up your own mind as opposed to implicitly believing

people who are telling you that if you look long enough for weapons of body mass destruction you're going to find them. Even though we have a 100 year history of failing to find the weapons of body mass destruction and the advice you're getting from those people as well just keep on looking because the advice that hasn't worked for the last 100 years apparently is going to work at some point in the future although they can give no explanation whatsoever as to why it would ever work. OK thank you. All right let's go to the next caller this would be someone in Bana line too. Yeah. Yes good morning. Have to turn my phone up. I think you hear the Siss is decimating. I have a 10 year old granddaughter and I was looking at a bunch of jeans that were folded up and put aside. And I said oh are these jeans that you are going to put in your drawers or are they jeans that your mom is passing on. And she said well I used to wear them but now I'm too fat. And I

said honey you're not fat you're just growing. You're supposed to grow. That's what kids are supposed to do. And of course the clothes that you were last year aren't going to fit you this year so that was pretty appalling at Cannes and already she's just talking about getting fat. So in many ways I totally agree with you and on the other hand I am. I weigh about 250 and I'm only five feet four and a half and I have arthritis and they tell me that my knees wouldn't hurt so much if I lost weight and that seems like a realistic cause and effect on my part. And and I do try to emphasize exercise and I don't count my calories and things of that sort. So I think there are some times when dropping weight not getting skinnier but dropping weight might be appropriate.

Well yeah but I'd like to say a couple of things one is in response to your first point pair approximately one half of the 10 year old girls in this country at this time either are on or have been on a diet which I think is a really disastrous really. Yeah a commentary on the invidious niss of this diet culture and the very destructive effects it has on our youngsters I mean what is it telling us. What is it telling 10 year old girls when the message they're getting is that the most important thing they can do is to dedicate a significant portion of their energies and talents to trying to fit into this into this very narrow definition of a so-called ideal weight and I think that's terribly destructive both psychologically and physiologically. As to the second point in regard to regard to your own weight and arthritis in your knees it's true that people who are significantly heavier than average are going to be prone to certain kinds of illnesses that they necessary they wouldn't necessarily be prone to if they were not significantly heavier than average. But people who are significantly

thinner than average are going to be prone to certain kind of diseases that they would not be prone to if they were not so for example osteoporosis is far far more commonplace among thin women than it is among fat women and osteoporosis is obviously a very. Serious kind of syndrome now as to the practical question of one what what one ought to do. I think the medical research very strongly suggests that somebody who for example is sedentary and it's a high fat high sugar diet will benefit from becoming moderately physically active and perhaps eating a diet that's rich in fruits and vegetables and has a lot of fiber in it. Now this will not produce significant long term weight loss in the vast majority of cases but it will produce better health in regard to people who move from a less healthy to a more healthy lifestyle if you're already living a healthy lifestyle then you are a large person. Bye Bye bye. Genetic and environmental inheritance and it's true that there are that there are certain physiological disadvantages associated with that but for example there are tremendous physiological disadvantages associated with being male as opposed

to female in terms of health. But we don't take from that the lesson that we have to try to turn men into women. And so I would suggest that you know people who are significantly larger than average and who already have a healthy lifestyle recognize that they are simply significantly larger than average people. Personal question if I may. And would you consider yourself a chunky person a large person in terms of your physical hand. You know how would you describe your physical body. Well currently I mean I think it's a perfectly fair question because it's one that I always ask obesity researchers to tell me what their body message is because after all I think you know this advice the kind of advice that they're giving ought to be applied to themselves certainly. I'm myself right now culturally typed as basically fairly thin in most social contexts. I'm five foot eight and weigh about 165 pounds but I'm

very physically active I run a lot. And as a middle aged male I'm considered basically in most contexts somewhat thin although in Boulder Colorado where I live I'm not considered thin because everyone is so thin there but in any case. Nevertheless I'm right on the borderline of being overweight I probably am overweight at this moment because I had breakfast this morning which is just another example of how absurdly restrictive these standards are that someone such as myself who runs 40 miles a week is in excellent health and is considered a statically thin by most people or at least you know certainly not by any means fat is nevertheless labeled overweight by a government and a medical establishment that has these frankly crazy definitions. Thank you that are really enlightening conversation. Tara Well thank you for the call. We have some other calls and we're getting a second let me introduce Again our guest Paul Campos. He's the author of the book The Obesity Myth Why America's obsession with weight is hazardous to your health published by Gotham Books it's now in vailable in hardcover and soon in the paperback. He is professor of law at the University of

Colorado and has done a lot of writing and speaking on this subject America's war on fat. He will be giving a public lecture dealing with these subjects tonight at 7:30 on the campus at the Illinois program for research in the humanities at 8 0 5 West Pennsylvania. And it is free and open to the public if you would like to attend. Also they'll be a panel discussion on the issue of weight and how it's discussed in the media. That's on Wednesday three o'clock in the afternoon Thursday one o'clock in the afternoon a panel discussion on issues of race and fact. And then he also will be doing a book signing to morrow. At the La Union bookstore in the author's corner at noon and any and all of those things you should feel welcome to attend questions. Welcome to 3 3 3 W while all toll free 800 1:58 w wild 0 0 or 1 4 5 5. The first caller caller earlier was nice enough not to ask it this way but I would expect there probably a lot of people come up to you and say well what do you

know you're a professor of law you're not a doctor. Why should we believe what you have to say about essentially what is a medical subject and you knew you no doubt have to respond to that a lot. Oh yeah absolutely and one of the things I try to emphasize while I am try and say is two things in regard to that point one is that there are a great number of people in the medical profession physicians and other medical academics and other health care workers who agree with everything that I'm saying in this book and emphasize the very same things that I do and are sick and tired of hearing the same nonsense being jammed down the throats of their patients and jammed down the throats of the medical profession. I mean doctors like are like anyone else they don't like to be told to do things which are impossible for them to do and when they're told make your patients thin they're being told to do something that they cannot do. If the medical science has established anything it is the following telling people to reduce caloric intake and increase activity levels in order to produce weight loss. Does not work. That has been

proven. Through literally billions of instantiations over the course of the last 100 years or so ever since we came up obsessed with this issue. And so basically we're telling doctors to do something which they themselves know from their own clinical practice does not work and so they are very happy quite often to hear an alternative viewpoint on this. The second thing I want to emphasize is that what we have done in this culture is to inappropriately medicalize the concept of weight and the concept of body image. To say that doctors are the only people who are culturally authorized to talk about this is precisely to beg the question it is to treat something which in many ways has nothing to do with health or medicine but is rather a political and cultural and social issue as if it were nothing but a straightforward medical issue like like any other when in fact it's not at all. It is in fact something which to a great extent is a an issue that has nothing to do with medicine but has been in appropriately medicalized when you treat people who are perfectly normal and have healthy

lifestyles as if they have a disease simply because they don't fit in. And in term in some very narrow and unscientific. Definition of ideal weight which you are doing is you are in a properly medicalizing an issue and that's why it's so important for people both in and out of the medical profession to criticize our obsession with weight and our inappropriate pathology izing of of two thirds of the American population. Let's get back to the phones here. Line 3 is next someone here locally in Champaign Urbana. It's a little slow. Yes. Interesting. Please comment on some items in the news recently and or what you'd suggest as remedies for what's called discrimination like the news said at a casino the personnel had to be thinned to keep their jobs. The paper questioned whether this was an all strictly illegal. Then some people weighing about 280 and 400 pounds had to buy second tickets on airlines and they didn't like that. And the third smokers in

Michigan. So that they were told they'd lose their jobs if they didn't stop smoking so now there's a lawmaker trying to pass a law that prevents that so please. Common troll. OK sure. It's important to understand that first of all there is almost no legal protection based on body size in this country there are only a very few places in this country words illegal to discriminate on the basis of body size it's basically legal and ninety nine point five percent of America. And when you understand that body size is to a large extent to in fact the greatest extent something that is not alterable for most people in the long term then it becomes clear that discriminating on the basis of body size is very similar to discriminating on the basis of any on alterable physical characteristic and since most people believe that and in fact in most instances it's even legal to discriminate on the basis of some alterable physical characteristic. I think we should be very very disturbed by the

notion that we allow both businesses and the government to discriminate on the basis of body size and body size is something that most people cannot significantly change in the long run. The comparison with smoking I think is problematic because we have to remember smoking is a behavior and I'm not saying that there isn't anything problematic against discriminating in discriminating against people on the basis of whether they smoke or not because I do think there are problematic aspects of that. But we must remember that while smoking is a behavior a so-called overweight and obesity are not behaviors they are. They are body states they are. They are to a great extent part of the natural variation in human diversity in regard to physical characteristics and we should not we should not buy into the fundamental myth that people who are fat can be thin. That almost without exception simply is not true. On the other hand it is quite often possible for people who are smokers to become not nonsmokers because it's a

much more it's a much slower more straightforward kind of question because you're dealing with a behavior rather than an one in many ways is an unalterable physical characteristic and one of things that fuels now so much of this is Steria is this myth that people could be thin if they chose to be. I mean if that were true there would be no fat people in America. If shaming fat people about their bodies made people thin there would be no fat people in America if discriminating as fat people on the basis of their bodies made people thin there would be no fat people in America. And I think it is actually quite disgraceful that we allow ourselves to discriminate against people on the basis of physically what is in many ways a physically and in alterable set of characteristics. It seems to me though that as long as being overweight is as stigmatized as it is giving somebody a message it says people Pat people are born fat people got to be pretty discouraging. Well I don't think it's discouraging because I think I personally think that it is much more discouraging to be told a set of lies that you could be thin if you tried hard enough that's what's really discouraging because what we end up doing in

this culture is we end up blaming people for things that there's nothing that they can they can really do about in the long run. And that I think is much more detrimental than saying to people if you have a healthy lifestyle you will be healthier than somebody who does not whether you're fat and they're thin or both of you are fat or both or you're thin or what have you. What matters is lifestyle. And of course lifestyle this has some effect on weight on the margin but it's a relatively mild or marginal kind of an effect. Most people who are larger than average will continue to be larger than average no matter what they do. And by the way most people who are thin are going to be thin no matter what they do there are millions of thin Americans who have terrible lifestyles in terms of health very often in fact they maintain their thinness by doing things that are bad for their health such as for example smoking or engaging in eating disordered behavior compulsive exercise or what have you. Things that can be quite detrimental to health and yet they have messages that they get from the culture is your thin so everything is fine which is also a very destructive message for them to get.

OK. Let's go to Urbana next one number one. Hello. Good morning. Yes. I may have. Missed it since I come in late but it helps me to begin at the beginning. Data that gives rise to a cable's of height and weight. Is that based on the way things used to be. That is actuary actually got a list of thousands and thousands of people and did a spread of height and weight and it was basically assumed this is the way it ought to be because right now when the data was collected this is the way things are. Or has there been other sources of the data for height weight distributions. It would help a lot if we sort of started at the beginning. Find out whether this was based on a snapshot or a distorted data gathering. Could you speak to that please.

Oh absolutely and as a fascinating social history here the way this all started to go back to the beginning as you say is the 100 20s and 30s there was a man at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company named Louis double and who became obsessed with the notion that thinness was better than fatness and that you would be able to predict mortality on the basis of whether insurance policy holders were thin or fat which of course be a very beneficial thing in terms of the economics of life insurance. The only problem with this is that his theory was completely false. He put together these height weight tables which were which were constructed in the most unscientific way imaginable and which never in fact correlated with mortality risk in any meaningful way one of the big secrets of the the famous MetLife tables which all of us who are of a certain age can remember from the 1960s and 70s is that the Metropolitan Life insurance company never used its own tables for the purposes of pricing insurance. So the actuarial value of these things is essentially nil. And yet they became this kind of gospel which has now been replaced by the government's body mass index tables which again

if you actually look at them do not correlate in any kind of meaningful way with health risk except it really. Extreme and real statistical extremes. And so one of the most at striking aspects of all this is if the data simply does not support the recommendations that are being put forth either by life insurance companies traditionally or by the government now. So what we're discussing is a real fact though people did do data on what existed that they didn't buy as the data states that 97 percent of people or less in this weight 95 percent or less of this weight 90 percent less in this way. Are those data historically factual as far as you can tell. Well actually out of the way things actually work. While the snapshot as a descriptive matter was somewhat accurate if you're just talking about a life insurance policy holders who of course were a very limited sector of the population as a whole much wealthier than average. The general census population

while no one ever really did that in terms of the general census until until relatively recently. But again it's just a snapshot of the way things are run. Predicted Well right I mean you know the long term predictive studies that have been done on this show essentially that when you take other other kinds of factors into account. Weight has basically no value in terms of predicting life expectancy and health except at real statistical extremes and in particular the government's definition of healthy weight which is very narrow and which some people are trying to narrow even more now in this field does not have any scientific credibility and this is I mean I realize that this is kind of a shocking conclusion and one which people national will will resist but I have dealt with the history of say IQ and IQ testing know that for the best of motives strange things get put on paper. Well you're absolutely correct about that and I think one of the things that people who who are familiar with for example the history of science in the sociology

of science will recognize is that the story that I'm laying out in this book is not a unique one. It has taken place in other contexts as well. Ask another question. Well we're really short on time and have a lot of other callers. I appreciate you indulging Let's go to Linda before and this is someone in Chicago. Hello. Hello Mr. Capra I read your book last year and it was the most Well one of the most important books I read last year. I really congratulate you on writing that because I think that it would be very hard for people in public health to write it because there's almost mass I don't know math. Hypnotism or mass delusion that goes on and you are absolutely right. Unfortunately many people who go into Nutrition and Dietetics have eating disorders and because of that their viewpoint of weight and their almost phobia about weight. I think really does reflect in the research and how they interpret research. One of the comments though that you make you talk about in the book you haven't

had a chance to talk about now is how the discrimination against people who are overweight unfortunately also correlates with discrimination against race. And I just wanted to point out to you one thing that irritates me there's a commercial for Universal Studios where they show this grossly overweight black woman and you realize that if they had put her in my mouth that people would be protesting all over but because they have her just simply overweight. I guess many people don't see that this is. Obviously a racial slur. Well there is a very interesting and disturbing intersection between race prejudice and also class prejudice and await. There is an inverse correlation in this in this culture between weight and socioeconomic status in other words the heavier you are the more likely you are to be poor and the thinner you are the more likely you are to be rich generalizing of course. This correlation also tracks to some extent ethnicities So for example working class whites

tend to be about the same weight as African-Americans and Latino's in general. And I think it is not coincidental that the obsession that our public health authorities have have developed on this issue and the irrationality of it and the junk science that fuels it also helps fuel a lot of traditional prejudices in terms of race and ethnicity and social class to be overly reductive but to make an hour you know which is made with more nuance in the book itself I think a lot of what you have here are thin upper class white people projecting their neuroses out onto the larger. Poorer people who are often people of color and I think the underlying sociological and political reasons for that kind of projection are very disturbing and something that people ought to take very very seriously and not just buy into I mean just to elaborate on your point about eating disorders. I think what we have in this culture right now is the equivalent of what we would have if for instance public health authorities were

alcoholics and didn't know it and were giving people advice about social drinking if that was a situation I'm sure they would say things like you ought to have six or eight beers when you get home from work in the evening because it really takes the edge off the day. I mean I think we're having a similar thing right now with weight in this culture in which people are saying try you know try to see the world through an anorexic lens because this really worked for me. And their hope focuses on behavior modification and that's the buzzword. And quite often it's their behavior that really needs to be modified and help rather than the general public. But again thank you very much. You did a perfect. Important public service and I'd As I said try don't think anyone in the health field would have done it because I think a graduate student would have been crucified by their professors and someone else who was a professional would have been crucified by his colleagues who have invested a great deal of money and most of their career and one in one's philosophy. Well unfortunately there's a lot to what you say about you know thank you for thank you for life for your

kind words about the book. You're one of them. Come back here to someone in Urbana I believe Lie number two. Hello. Yes I think we do have a severe obesity crisis in this country and people like your guest who universe treats this constancy for appearing during these talks to a healthy lifestyle and you really can't have a healthy lifestyle because it means in good health. What he really means that we need a hopeful lifestyle. Everything looked as if you have the best movies about Supersize Me You had those Big Macs to be in before the person wouldn't. This is a big barracks he would he would share with he would share with everyone and everyone could see the whole thing looking Big Mac the Big Mac is not hopeful. I mean educated can convince the public the difference of what if posting and what is health risks of the things that have no. Well comment on this. Sure. I think a healthful lifestyle

is a lifestyle that does not obsess unnecessarily on either weight or for example suppose a junk food. Now I'm not a proponent of going out and eating three supersized McDonald's meals a day any more than I'm a proponent of drinking a case of beer every day if I drink a case of beer every day for a month I'm sure I would have some very detrimental health effects from that. However that does not mean that having a you know a beer a day isn't a good thing in fact for the most part of it is I think a healthful diet includes a mixture of foods including sometimes foods that have plenty of fat and sugar in them for all kinds of reasons because you need those substances and also because one of the one of the things about a healthful diet is a pleasurable diet I don't think I don't think we should leave my own pleasure out of eating food. And by the way this I have heard from a number of people that I'm supposedly increasing America's obesity epidemic. Bringing a critical perspective onto what I see as our hysteria on this issue. Actually I

think that if you wanted to create a culture full of fat people what you would do is you would do exactly what our public health authorities have been doing for several decades now which is to create this kind of obsessive compulsive regard for thinness and this notion that everybody ought to be on a diet and that we ought to demonize certain foods and then if you Krispy Kreme donut your head is going to explode just basically the kind of message we're getting from our public health authorities hey if that made people thin we would have solved the obesity epidemic a long time ago. One of the things that I'm recommending here is why don't we try something different after all we've been doing with the health authorities in regard to this as you have been saying for decades now and rather than making people think and it's making people fat because one of the things that makes people heavier than they would be otherwise is precisely this diet culture with all of its obsessional ism and with its tendency to co-create weight cycling in people which among other facts does make people fatter than they would otherwise be. And that is there is clear evidence that doing the doing that losing weight gaining it back losing weight gaining it back. And not only do when people gain it back they they often gain more than they

write. Fortunately there was clear evidence that that is indeed a bad thing. Yeah there's a lot of evidence that white cycling is bad for health and one of the things that you see over and over again in these studies is if you take people of similar initial weight the people who diet end up weighing more than people who don't so the weight loss industry is essentially creating the quote unquote disease which they supposedly cure with their useless an expensive and dangerous therapies like at least one more. Line 3 is next I believe in Urbana. Hello. Yeah calling to argue the point that you think there are no health benefits from being not obese. I mean that's just preposterous you're not you. It's not common sense and it's not it's not medically valid what you're saying. People blood pressure do go down when there have an appropriate way and whether the tables are exactly right or not. It's not arguable that people are too heavy in general in this country I mean you can see it you can see it in

the children you can see it when you go out to eat and you can see the lifestyle that contributes to it. So it's a mix. I mean maybe the diet industry certainly does perpetuated in this sense but you can't throw out. The logic of needing to eat healthy and have a healthy lifestyle in order to be healthy. Well I'm all for a healthy lifestyle I'm all for being physically active I'm all for eating balanced nutritious diet I'm all for avoiding eating disordered behaviors including things like dieting which is essentially a form of eating disordered behavior you have to restrict a couple Clore you have to pay attention and you have to be a conscious eater and hold yourself accountable to a certain amount of calories or some kind of guidelines in order to eat within a healthy parameters. Given the choices that we have in this country and the usual choices that people make for their diet when I disagree with that eating it you know I

disagree with that because I think that focusing on caloric intake is a essentially a way of being on the road to eating disordered behavior if focusing on caloric intake made people healthier and thinner again. You know why would people be gaining weight in this country I mean that's what that's what the everyone is told to do everyone do you want to keep throwing in the parallels with having a couple beers. Right. Anybody stop at a couple of pairs and why should anybody ever monitor themselves and try to monitor how much they drink if they're if they're prone to over drinking. Well because over drinking is a disease called alcoholism being heavier than average is not a disease even though it was a user. There is a complex relationship between weight and health and one of the things that that is really tremendously exaggerated about all this is the notion that if you're heavier than average you're going to be much more prone to say heart disease or cancer than you will be if you are thin and at ease and huffing and puffing in order to do any exercise.

So you don't do any I mean there's there kind of reason that people should not want to be overweight. Who are obese and that right people diet because they don't want to you know affect not just the society looking at. Now that's actually quite untrue. The main reaction oh no it's not true the main reason why people want to be thin in the society is because of comments like yours because people who don't understand the science behind this I do wonder if you know I actually you know what you're doing is you're essentially perpetrating eating disordered patterns of thinking here. Does it actually help anybody to be told to cut their caloric intake for the purposes of making them thin. It certainly doesn't make it seem to make people thin if dieting made people thin there wouldn't be any fat people. What you're saying is everybody should continue to do the stuff that has been proven not to work and which makes people less healthy and less happy than they would be otherwise. I'm going to have to jump in here my apologies to the caller I am sure she would like to continue to talk with her guest but we simply have to stop we have used our time. There are going to be some opportunities though to hear more from him and to talk with him. A public lecture tonight at 7:30 dealing with

these themes that the Illinois program for research in the humanities in 0 5 West Pa. will be doing a book signing of his book The Obesity Myth at the author's corner of the A-line Union bookstore at noon tomorrow. And then a couple of panel discussions to one Wednesday at 3 p.m. Thursday at 1:00 pm dealing with a lot of these issues again that's at our age. So if you're interested they're all open to the public our guest Paul Campos who's Professor of Law University Colorado thank you. Thank you.