The girth of a nation

Americans are way too fat -- right? Well, maybe not. A controversial new book claims that our diet-crazed culture is buying into a big lie.

By Rebecca Traister

Jun 29, 2004 | It's summer, and across America people are grilling hamburgers but eschewing the buns; they're vacuuming up every crumb of information about how Kate Hudson lost her baby weight, and how Mary-Kate Olsen has finally copped to her anorexia. The South Beach diet continues to sizzle; pasta companies are going under; and still we're bombarded with stories about class-action suits against McDonald's and news of how obesity is threatening to gobble our country's youth whole. But a new book wants to blow holes in our fixation with weight. According to "The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession With Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health," we are all being duped, not only about the concept that weight consciousness will lead to better health, but about the notion that being overweight is such a big problem anyway.

Paul Campos, a professor of law at the University of Colorado, argues passionately that the idea that America is in the midst of an obesity epidemic is false. He says that we're willing to buy into the notion of a national fat emergency because the medical profession and the media feed us misleading information about the connections between weight and health risks such as hypertension, cancer and heart disease. Campos says that what the studies actually show -- before they have been garbled by an "anorexic" media -- is that improved health is possible with a moderate amount of increased physical activity, regardless of our weight. But that message gets lost in the fever-pitch of fad diets, ever-shrinking government definitions of what it means to be overweight, and cultural discrimination against people who fail to meet the unrealistic and unnecessary standards for slimness.

Salon spoke with Campos from his Colorado home about Jennifer Aniston's body mass index, Dr. Phil's near-obesity, and how we should worry more about the increased weight of automobiles than our own extra pounds.

You're a lawyer. How did you get interested in the medical profession's obsession with weight loss?

I was speaking at a conference on the Clinton impeachment and I started looking at the media coverage of the Lewinsky scandal and was struck by how frequently the media referred to Monica Lewinsky's weight. I was particularly struck by the frequent use of the word "zaftig." Then Andrew Morton's book "Monica's Story" came out, and I was just astonished to read about the forthcomingness of Monica about her weight anxieties and Bill's and Linda Tripp's. It turned out that the bulk of what Monica and Tripp talked about was weight! There was this tremendous opprobrium that fell on Monica and Bill and Hillary for not having superthin bodies. Hillary particularly was constantly upbraided for having thick calves. I'm not sure what she was supposed to do about her calves.

But then even more scandalous was what I discovered through talking to lots of sociologists and people involved in the research end of all this. I discovered the tremendously exaggerated quality of the claims about how obesity -- as defined by government standards -- was being regarded as an epidemic that has direct correlation to health. I discovered what I consider to be a large cultural hysteria about how we're on the verge of a public health calamity. And what is essentially a social, cultural and political concern has been transformed into a medical issue. And that ridiculous notion ends up being transmuted into the claim that it's only doctors who can be approved to speak authoritatively on it. And not just doctors -- weight-loss doctors, who run weight-loss clinics and are benefiting from the hysteria.

Next Page: "The whole thing makes as much sense as reefer madness or hysteria over satanic ritual abuse in our day-care centers"

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