Interview with Paul Campos
Oct. 4th, 2005 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sarahmichiganPaul Campos has his biases, but he's certainly passionate about debunking the hype about the so-called "obesity epidemic" and pointing out how much of our purported interest in people's health is really just distaste for the way big people look.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/052705E.html
excerpts:
re: The Centers for Disease Control recently revising figures claiming that obesity was responsible for anywhere in the vicinity of 300,000 or 400,000 deaths a year, numbers that were grossly exaggerated.
Campos: Well in one sense, the revision didn't surprise me. It didn't surprise me in the sense that if they were actually going to do an accurate and honest evaluation of the epidemiological literature, there was no way that the earlier 300,000 figure from 1998 or the 410,000 figure from 2004 could stand up to scrutiny.
The epidemiology on this issue is extremely extensive and what it shows is that there is no significant difference in relative risks or early mortality between the so called normal or ideal weight category on the one hand and the so called overweight category on the other. When you look at the obese category you do not begin to see significant increases in relative risk until you start getting to really high levels of obesity. What's more, you see similar levels of relative risk associated with only slight amounts of so called underweight that are similar to what you see with very high levels of obesity.
...
[I]f you actually look at the median weight gain in the population over the course of the last generation, it's probably been about eight pounds. The mean is higher than that because you have some real significant weight gain at the far right end of the tail of the bell curve. But the median is probably only about eight pounds or so. Such a weight gain, when you look at the actual epidemiological data, has absolutely no significance in terms of increasing relative risk for either mortality or morbidity in a way that any epidemiologist would ever pay any attention to it.
...
I really think that what's fueling this [obsesity panic] on a basic level are these anxieties about decadence and over-consumption and laziness and that somehow we've got something wrong with ourselves as a nation. And this is always being projected out on to this matter of weight.
It's a way of using ideology to turn an aesthetic and cosmetic preference into a medical matter and then to moralize that medical matter. So we are medicalizing and moralizing essentially matters of fashion.
The claim that weight is an important medical issue is not completely false, it's just largely false. At the statistical extremes of thinness and fatness, there's no question that weight has some relevance. But for the vast majority of people in this culture, and including the vast majority of people who are classified as weighing too much -- especially this completely phony overweight category -- it doesn't.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/052705E.html
excerpts:
re: The Centers for Disease Control recently revising figures claiming that obesity was responsible for anywhere in the vicinity of 300,000 or 400,000 deaths a year, numbers that were grossly exaggerated.
Campos: Well in one sense, the revision didn't surprise me. It didn't surprise me in the sense that if they were actually going to do an accurate and honest evaluation of the epidemiological literature, there was no way that the earlier 300,000 figure from 1998 or the 410,000 figure from 2004 could stand up to scrutiny.
The epidemiology on this issue is extremely extensive and what it shows is that there is no significant difference in relative risks or early mortality between the so called normal or ideal weight category on the one hand and the so called overweight category on the other. When you look at the obese category you do not begin to see significant increases in relative risk until you start getting to really high levels of obesity. What's more, you see similar levels of relative risk associated with only slight amounts of so called underweight that are similar to what you see with very high levels of obesity.
...
[I]f you actually look at the median weight gain in the population over the course of the last generation, it's probably been about eight pounds. The mean is higher than that because you have some real significant weight gain at the far right end of the tail of the bell curve. But the median is probably only about eight pounds or so. Such a weight gain, when you look at the actual epidemiological data, has absolutely no significance in terms of increasing relative risk for either mortality or morbidity in a way that any epidemiologist would ever pay any attention to it.
...
I really think that what's fueling this [obsesity panic] on a basic level are these anxieties about decadence and over-consumption and laziness and that somehow we've got something wrong with ourselves as a nation. And this is always being projected out on to this matter of weight.
It's a way of using ideology to turn an aesthetic and cosmetic preference into a medical matter and then to moralize that medical matter. So we are medicalizing and moralizing essentially matters of fashion.
The claim that weight is an important medical issue is not completely false, it's just largely false. At the statistical extremes of thinness and fatness, there's no question that weight has some relevance. But for the vast majority of people in this culture, and including the vast majority of people who are classified as weighing too much -- especially this completely phony overweight category -- it doesn't.
