The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health Hardcover – May 3, 2004

"From the perspective of a profit-maximizing medical and pharmaceutical industry, then, the ideal disease would be one that never killed those who suffered from it, that could not be treated effectively, and that doctors and their patients would nevertheless insist on treating anyway. Luckily for it, the American health-care industry has discovered (or rather invented) just such a disease. It's called 'obesity'."

In THE OBESITY MYTH, author/law professor Paul Campos makes an erudite and scathing case against the American diet industry, which, with its paid-lackey researchers and gullible fellow travelers in the medical and government health establishments, directly and simplistically links obesity with disease and generally compromised health. Rather, Campos concludes that the evidence shows that:

1. It's more dangerous to be underweight than overweight.

2. Health is not improved by long-term weight reduction.

3. Health is adversely affected by the yo-yo pattern of weight loss and subsequent regain experienced by serial dieters.

4. The nebulous connection between weight and health disappears when other factors are considered, e.g. the individual's cardiovascular and metabolic fitness. An overweight fit person is better off than a thin sedentary person.

Rather than being a monotonous, 250-page diatribe against the Fat Police, Campos goes out on a limb in a couple of chapters to make some novel observations. For instance, regarding the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky sleazefest in the chapter "The Feeding of the President", the author postulates that the entire affair wouldn't have happened if "at several crucial junctures in their respective lives, either the fat boy from Hope of the zaftig princess from Beverly Hills had simply been allowed to eat what they wanted to eat." Later, in "Anorexia Nervosa and the Spirit of Capitalism", Campos asserts that the true anorexic - the perfect dieter endlessly laboring to achieve perfection and salvation, but never satisfied - is the new embodiment of the Puritan work ethic.

It would be difficult, I think, for any American that's grown up in our fat-conscious society not to relate to this most excellent volume. At 56, I've never perceived myself as slim or trim, a rather odd admission since, if I look at pictures of myself taken in late elementary and high school, that's what I indeed was; in my first year of college, I had a 29-inch waist. Perhaps my misperception stems from my days as an admittedly chubby 5-8 year old when my Mom would buy me "husky boy" jeans. Far from being an omniscient observer of something that's never personally affected him, Paul Campos remembers much the same childhood experience, when he was called "stocky". As an adult, he admits to being a slave to the same cultural imperative for thinness, going so far as to state that his periodic weight losses from "overweight" come when the women in his life have left him, or hinted they might.

In the "Conclusion", Campos mildly castigates himself for not saying in THE OBESITY MYTH all those things which might have made it better. (For instance, surprising to me, he virtually ignores the current fad for weight loss surgery - stomach stapling and banding.). But he concludes:

"Yet still, certain things that needed to be said were, in the end, said." Yes, they were. And it was smartly done, too. Good man!

In the process of reading this book, I'm struck at how amusing the response is from Michael Fumento and his friends/alter-egos posting here. Every point they raise to "refute" Campos is specifically addressed in the first chapters of the book. Campos carefully addresses the flaws in these arguements and backs up his assertions with a straight-forward presentation of the facts behind the accusations of fat bashers. Nothing Fumento and his ilk have brought up addresses any of the criticisms Campos levels on their arguement, leading me to the conclusion that not a one of them has opened this book. They are just offering the same knee-jerk hyperbolic condemnation fat bashers always offer when anyone questions their highly unfounded attacks on fat. Campos has provided the public with a valuable study of the issues surrounding weight and health. It may not be what you're used to hearing, but don't make the mistake some have made by damning the book without examining its arguement.

...in order to save myself from a young lifetime of futile (and probably dangerous) dieting. And I wish every 12-year-old (and their parents and teachers and siblings) could read it now, for the same reason.
The level of hysteria out there about "obesity" these days rivals that of the Salem witch hunts 400-some years ago. Campos counters that hysteria by doing something most mainstream media outlets don't dare even attempt: he actually reviews the data from the studies on which those dire predictions of weight-based mortality are allegedly based. In doing so, he discovers -- much to his shock -- that in the vast majority of cases, the "conclusions" drawn by both researchers and media don't jibe with the numbers, and instead are heavily influenced by popular prejudice against fat (not to mention the desire for diet and pharmaceutical-industry research and ad dollars).
An example from the book concerns that infamous study published in the New England Journal of Medicine about a year ago that reported that fat people were far more likely than thin people to die of cancer, which was reported by many media outlets as evidence of "Americans eating themselves to death." Yet as Campos points out, according to this survey's actual data, that people with body-mass indices in the "overweight" 25-29.9 range occupied by most "fat" Americans actually had lower cancer death rates than those in the "ideal" BMI range of 18.5-24.9; that even among the most "obese," the increase amounted to nothing more than one to two extra cancer deaths per 1000 people; and most tellingly of all, that even the "morbidly obese" women in this study had lower cancer death rates than the "ideal weight" men! (In an amusing aside to the latter, Campos chides: "It seems unlikely that this typical statistic...will lead to a Surgeon General's Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Masculinity.")
How does this sort of gross distortion keep happening? What can we do to fight back? Read more of this essential book to find out.

Campos and Fumento could go toe to toe and argue endlessly about how epidemiological studies can be interpreted. But, when you imagine Fumento, don't forget to envision the giant 40 Billion-with-a-B dollar weight loss industry behind him. Who is behind Campos? His x-ray vision is used to great effect in the Obesity Myth, especially when he exposes the ugly underbelly of classism and racism in the so-called fight against obesity.
When American anti-fat capitalists went to the World Health Organization to promote a "health plan" for obesity, they rightly told them, "Uh, we think malnutrition and AIDS are more important issues right now," revealing how off the mark we are in this country. We are not dying from obesity, in fact, we Americans are living longer than ever before, fat and all!