The Nuance
Our Obsession With Body Size Is a Threat to Public Health
Anti-fat bias and weight-loss fixation — including among doctors — is a problem that must be remedied
The study’s findings were surprising, even to its organizers.
Led by researchers at the CDC and the National Cancer Institute, the study examined roughly 30 years of data collected from tens of thousands of Americans. Its purpose was to identify associations between body mass index (BMI) and excess mortality. Its findings, which were published in JAMA in 2005, revealed that adults who were overweight were at no greater risk of death than those who fell into the “normal” BMI range. People with BMIs in the obese range were at increased risk of death, but so too — albeit to a lesser extent — were people categorized as underweight.
“Being overweight was associated with lower mortality than being underweight, which we didn’t expect to find,” says Katherine Flegal, PhD, first author of that study and a former senior scientist at the CDC. “Later we did this whole meta-analysis, and we found that this was actually a very common finding” — that being overweight was not associated with any kind of increased health risk — “but that researchers tended to tuck this away so that it was hard to find.”
