IJE Advance Access originally published online on December 8, 2005
International Journal of Epidemiology 2006 35(1):55-60; doi:10.1093/ije/dyi254
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2005; all rights reserved.
Point-Counterpoint |
The epidemiology of overweight and obesity: public health crisis or moral panic?
1 School of Law, University of Colorado, CO, USA
2 Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
3 Department of Nutrition, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, OH, USA
4 Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
5 Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, VA, USA
* Corresponding author. E-mail: paul.campos@colorado.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
National and international health organizations have focused increasingly on a perceived obesity epidemic said to pose drastic threats to public health. Indeed, some medical experts have gone so far as to predict that growing body mass will halt and perhaps even reverse the millennia-long trend of rising human life expectancy.1 In response to such concerns public health agencies across the world have sprung into action, searching for policies or incentives to mitigate the alleged ‘disease’ of obesity.
Yet even as the volume of alarm grows louder, a growing number of researchers, drawn from a broad array of academic disciplines, are calling these claims into question. The authors of this article come from this latter group. In our view the available scientific data neither support alarmist claims about obesity nor justify diverting scarce resources away from far more pressing public health issues. This article evaluates four central claims made by those
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Social and political contributors to the obesity panic |
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