Thanks for your post. I would really love to see the research that backs up your statement, because all the research I’ve read, and there is a lot of it, shows the links are very very weak, at best. It’s interesting that the line between ‘normal’ and ‘overweight’, and ‘overweight’ and ‘ obese’ has moved several times over the last 80 or so years, and each time people who were ‘ normal’ suddenly,overnight, becamse overweight, creating a massive tens-of-billions-of-dollars’ market for weight loss products and programs. The shifts have been based on overall death rates from all causes, but weight is the one factor that’s easy to measure, whether it’s related or not it’s been blamed. There are NO studies which directly link weight to mortality, except in the case of extreme overweight, we’re talking 400 kilos.

Movement is in fact much more important to health than is weight, and by movement I mean moderate walking for 30 minutes a day. Studies show that even conditions such as diabetes are hugely improved with just such moderate exercise, and no dietary changes at all.

We have come to see health and thinness as the same thing, but they are not. Other lifestyle factors are very much more important. For example, hundreds of thousands of women smoke to keep thin, and I’m sure you’d agree that smoking is a proven health and life destroyer. The diseases triggered and made worse by smoking cost the public purse hundreds of millions of dollars each year, and take thousands of lives. Being “overweight” however does not, despite what the press-release-driven popular media tells us.

By making body weight a disease, we can easily be lead to believe that a drug we take every day for the rest of our lives, can cure the “illness” of being overweight. As I write there are over 60 drugs under development for the “disease” of body fat. It’s a very clever strategy, and has not one single thing to do with our health. And it’s a very interesting diversionary tactic from the things that are actually making us sick, such as the plastics in every product that leech into the foods we eat and move through our skin from our cosmetics and detergents, that are changing the way our genes express, causing cancers that were previously unknown, and changing the hormones that drive our personalities. Much easier to point the finger at people our fashion sense considers ” fat” and ignore the really hard questions.