JAMA Denial

You may remember the JAMA study which showed that the range of weight generally defined as “overweight” (as opposed to normal, underweight, or obese) was actually associated with the best health outcomes. (See the full study here.) Paul Campos has an excellent article about how the Harvard School of Public Health has, in spite of these results, continued to push claims that people should optimally be at the low end of their “normal” BMI range (108 and 129 pounds for women and men of average height, respectively.) This “flies directly in the face of the actual data.” The main techniques are mischaracterizing the JAMA study, ignoring their own results when they yield inconvenient data, and relying on their own inferior data pool. The bottom line:

Of course, one reason the Harvard claims are treated with such respect is that they tell people what they want to hear. Their claims dovetail perfectly with social prejudices that declare one can never be too rich or too thin, and with the widespread desire to believe that sickness and death can be avoided if one follows the rules laid down by the appropriate authority figures. Combine these factors with the social cachet wielded by the Harvard name, a willingness to make brazen assertions that run from serious exaggerations to outright lies, and lazy journalism of the “some say the Earth is flat; others claim it’s round; the truth no doubt lies somewhere in the middle” type, of which the Scientific American article is only the most recent example, and you have a recipe for an epidemic of wildly misleading statements dressed up in the guise of authoritative scientific discourse.

The conflation of health and weight is about aesthetics and class, not health.