Although a majority of public health experts would be quick to preach against the dangers of obesity, there are some who continue to voice their opinion that the so-called obesity epidemic is a miscalculated term.
“The obesity epidemic has absolutely been exaggerated,” said Dr. Vincent Marks, emeritus professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Surrey.
Experts like Dr. Marks claim that they have yet to see conclusive evidence which could allow them to blame obesity for health risks such as heart disease or cancer.
Experts on the other side of the issue would be likely to label these notions as heresies.
Dr. James Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado, said that there is a strong correlation between obesity and diabetes which can lead to kidney and heart disease among other health problems.
“The evidence linking obesity to diabetes and cardiovascular disease is very strong,” Hill, said. “Type two diabetes rarely happens in people who aren’t obese.”
However, Eric Oliver, author of Fat Politics and a political science professor at the University of Chicago, said that there is “no good causal connection,” that links being fat to dangerous health problems.
The skeptical experts also have doubts about the projected rate of obesity such as the British government’s estimation that nearly half of Britain will be obese by 2050. They claim there’s simply not enough evidence to support such a claim.
To them, the issue is that too many people are considered fat.
The World Health Organization labels anyone with a body mass index above 25 as overweight, and anyone with a BMI above 30 is obese. Experts on both sides have criticized their grading scale for being too low.
“Being moderately plump is not a health disadvantage,” Marks said. “Some overweight people may not look svelte, but they may be perfectly healthy.”
Marks refers to studies such as one published by Katherine Flegal of the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in which she noted that people who had extra weight tended to live longer than their skinnier counterparts.
In other related research, Flegal and colleagues found there to be almost no link between death rates and weight.
“I think some experts found it disturbing that we actually said that overweight people have a lower death risk,” Flegal said.
“The relationship between weight and disease and survival is very complex and we don’t have a good handle on why some of these things are related and others are not.”
Many obesity skeptics question the motives of researchers who campaign against obesity claiming that they are simply chasing the millions of dollars in the weight loss industry.
“There’s not a lot of money in trying to debunk obesity, but a huge amount in making sure it stays a big problem,” said Patrick Basham, a professor of health care policy at Johns Hopkins University.
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