spiked | It’s official: you can be fat and fit

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Wednesday 3 September 2008

It’s official: you can be fat and fit
Contrary to the government hysteria, being obese is not an indicator of ill-health, and it’s far
from a death sentence.
Basham and Luik

One of the more depressing things about the constant talk of an obesity epidemic that is
killing us all, and most particularly our children, is the media’s constant readiness to
give room to almost any nonsense so long as the word fat appears in it, while ignoring
significant research that fails to fit the now-conventional wisdom that ‘being fat =
death’.

Recently this trend has been on display in the way in which the British press has uncritically
reported the views of Professor David Hunter of Durham University. Described by the Daily
Telegraph as a ‘leading public health expert’, Hunter has claimed that the UK National Health
Service (NHS) will become unaffordable due to the costs of treating obesity-related diseases,
opined that obesity requires ‘strong action’ from government, and demanded that the government
require tobacco-like warnings on foods that are high in fat, salt or sugar. Claiming that the obesity
epidemic posed as significant a threat as terrorism, Hunter derided the official response as nothing
more than ‘piddling’. According to Hunter, half the British population will be obese by 2032 (1).

Yet just days before Hunter’s outburst, the quality dailies, with the exception of the Telegraph,
which published a small piece deep inside the paper, failed to cover two new studies published in
the same issue of Archives of Internal Medicine which give the lie to a good many of today’s
doomsday scenarios as well as to much of the government’s propaganda about overweight and
obesity, not to say its ‘obesity strategy’.

The studies come from Germany and the US. The US study found that despite claims, such as
Hunter’s, about the dangers of obesity and the risks of the diabetic obese overwhelming the NHS,
roughly half of overweight people in the US - about 36million people - do not have raised blood
pressure or cholesterol levels. The same applies to about a third of the people - 20million - who are
categorised as ‘obese’. Moreover, about a quarter of normal-weight individuals have high blood
pressure or problematic levels of cholesterol. As the authors concluded, ‘the present data suggest a
high prevalence of cardiometabolic abnormality clustering among normal-weight individuals, as
well as a high prevalence of obese individuals who are metabolically healthy…’ The conclusions
were based on a representative sample of over 5,400 adults surveyed in the National Health and
Nutrition Examinations from 1999 to 2004 (2).

The German study found that insulin sensitivity was not statistically different in obese individuals
compared with normal weight individuals. In effect, the image of hordes of fatties with metabolic
problems leading to high levels of heart disease and diabetes is a myth. As the German research
team put it, a ‘metabolically benign obesity that is not accompanied by insulin resistance and early
atherosclerosis exists in humans’ (3).

This is indeed unwelcome news to the obesity crusaders, for it shows just how scientifically
unjustified their claims are, how generally untruthful the government’s claims about the dangers of
being overweight are, how compromised is their health advice about overweight and obesity, and
how unwarranted are the calls for draconian government interventions such as tobacco-like
warnings on so-called unhealthy foods. As MaryFran Sowers, one of the co-authors of the US study,
told the New York Times: ‘We use “overweight” almost indiscriminately sometimes. But there is
lots of individual variation within that, and we need to be cognizant of that as we think about what
our health messages should be.’ (4)

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise since there is considerable evidence that
‘fat-and-fit’ is not an oxymoron. For instance, last December the Journal of the American Medical
Association published a study which followed 2,600 American adults aged over 60 for 12 years. Two
striking findings emerged from the study. First, as in other studies, the overweight - that is those
with a body mass index (BMI) of 25 to 30 - had slightly lower death rates than those of ‘normal’
weight. Second, levels of fitness, not BMI, was the most reliable predictor of death. Those with the
lowest levels of fitness were significantly more likely to die, regardless of body weight.

Despite the incessant claims that the government’s obesity strategy is ‘evidence-based’, don’t
expect to hear about any of this research from anyone connected with the Department of Health.
After all, having invested so much time and money in spreading fears, it would be a shame now to
have to stop picking on the overweight and obese and find a genuine health problem on which to
focus.

Patrick Basham and John Luik are co-authors, with Gio Gori, of Diet Nation: Exposing the
Obesity Crusade, a Social Affairs Unit book. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

Previously on spiked
Patrick Basham and John Luik asked why so many fat camps were being opened in Britain and argued that
research taught obesity hysterics a lesson. Elsewhere they attacked the proposals to remove children from
obese households. Peter Marsh asked what’s behind the sensationalist child obesity headlines. Jennie
Bristow reported the findings of a spiked poll showing that parents should be responsible for children’s diets.
Or read more at spiked issue Obesity.

(1) Fatty foods ‘should carry official health warnings’, Daily Telegraph, 13 August 2008

(2) Wildman et al ‘The Obese Without Cardiometabolic Risk Factor Clustering and the Normal
Weight With Cardiometabolic Risk Factor Clustering’, Archives of Internal Medicine,
2008;168(15):1617-1624

(3) Stefan et al, ‘Identification and Characterization of Metabolically Benign Obesity in Humans’,
Archives of Internal Medicine, 2008;168(15):1609-1616

(4) For health, body size can be misleading, New York Times, 19 August 2008

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5682/

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