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Oprah’s normal weight

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The more one looks into this topic the more obvious it becomes that a concept like “normal weight” is so sociologically complex as to be practically meaningless.

A couple of further notes: One thing the fat police love to say when it’s pointed out that the entire overweight range and much of the obese range fails to correlate with any overall increased mortality or health risk (in fact the overweight range correlates with lower risk than the “normal” range) is that BMI is a poor proxy for “adiposity,” which is the real risk, and that if we were measuring this stuff on the basis of waist circumference or percent body fat then all the stuff they’re saying would actually start to have some basis in the data.

There was never really any evidence for this — these people are simply obsessed with the idea that body fat is bad per se and work from that as an axiom or a quasi-theological act of faith. Anyway I’ve just read a couple of articles in proof that examine this question directly. They use the NHANES data cited by the CDC and referenced in my linked article, and they find that waist circumference and percent body fat are neither meaningfully better or worse than BMI for predicting mortality risk. I’ll link to them when they’re published.

Anyway it really is hard to describe how crazy this stuff is. The short version is that you have a bunch of anorexics with medical degrees doing things like tossing out 90% of the data in their studies until they can claim science “proves” that their particular obsessions and neuroses ought to be the basis of public health policy.

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