Obesity Apocalypse
From this great blog! Bookmark this one! by Paul Campos Even by the remarkably mendacious standards of the "obesity" racket some of the claims in this story are beyond belief. The most laughable is the idea that by 2048 everybody in the US will be "overweight" or "obese." This result was derived via statistical extrapolation, the crack cocaine of social science analysis (by similar methods one could prove that within a few generations Olympic sprinters will be running at speeds that will hurl them into low Earth orbit and everyone in America will have a plasma TV seventeen miles wide). In fact there has been no weight gain at all over the past 30 years in the thinnest quartile of the population -- whatever (poorly understood) factors have caused Americans to weigh more on average now than they did in the 1970s have had very different impacts across the weight spectrum: thin people have gained no weight, people in the middle weigh 10-15 pounds than they d...