Despite all this evidence suggesting that lifestyle is far more important than body weight in terms of health, and that it might be more prudent to focus on getting people fit and healthy rather than trying to make them thin, the weight loss industry still barrels along like a runaway freight train. Aside from the cultural obsession with slimness, health professionals have done much to sanctify this quest for a lean body primarily by fueling a medical rationale for fat phobia: Obesity is a major killer. The most blatant but unjustified—example of this scare tactic is the widely publicized claim that obesity kills 300,000 Americans every year. Former U.S. surgeon general C. Everett Koop asserted as much when he launched his Shape Up American campaign in 1994. Since then, this figure has taken on a life of its own, appearing in scientific and medical journals and mentioned repeatedly in the media—each time reminding us of the "fact" that obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death.
The problem, however, is that there is absolutely no way to prove this assertion. In fact, the most frequently cited source of this statistic, a 1993 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows just how misinterpreted this statistic actually is.
The article, titled "Actual Causes of Death in the Untied States," attributes the 300,000 deaths per year to "diet/activity patterns"—not to obesity. Obesity is a physical trait; diet and physical activity are behaviors. To equate them not only is unjustified, it is absurd. While poor diet and lack of physical activity may lead to obesity, the truth of the matter is that the studies used to generate the 300,000 figure looked at the health impact of poor diet and sedentary lifestyle across the entire weight spectrum, not just among fat persons, (There are a great many less-than-healthy couch potatoes with poor dietary and exercise habits who—via luck of the genes—will never be fat).
