Wednesday, February 10, 2010

THE MYTH OF AN "OBESITY TSUNAMI"

Evidence is now flooding in from both America and England that obesity is the epidemic that never was...

Two studies produced by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association -- one about obesity in children and adolescents, and the other about adult obesity -- completely refute the claims of an obesity epidemic.

The study of children and adolescents looked at the body mass index (BMI) of children and adolescents over five time periods between 1999 and 2008, the decade during which child obesity was widely described as America's preeminent public health problem.

The results are striking:

  • During none of the five periods was there a statistically significant trend, except for boys at the highest BMI levels.
  • In other words, if there was a spike in obesity, it was confined to a very small number of very obese boys.

What about the adult "couch potato" generation? Here, again, the results put the lie to claims of an obesity tsunami. In the study of adults, the researchers also looked at obesity trends over the past decade:

  • For women, there were no statistically significant changes in obesity prevalence over the entire decade, while for men there were no prevalence differences during the last five years of the decade.

Clearly, governments' current course of draconian regulatory treatment seeks to cure an illusory disease. The nanny state's infatuation with an obesity epidemic that does not exist is a searing indictment of the perverting effect of government involvement in what should be scientific - not social/political - issues...

[Remember: once we buy in to the misguided notion that government exists to fix our problems, every 'problem' identified represents a money-making proposition...]

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