Body weight standards are an imprecise gauge of health, and of course weight doesn't cause many diseases. Being overweight, as the author stated, is a symptom.

But because that symptom is so evident in the American population, Americans' diets and activity levels need to change if they want to be healthy.

"The also have released faulty estimates about the amount of deaths attributable to obesity,"

Surely he isn't talking about that recent study that found that people who were heavier lived longer. It's since been debunked because the sample had included alot of people who were thin because of terminal illness.

“For most medical conditions, it is diet, exercise and genetics that are the real causes. Weight is merely an associated symptom.”

Yes, well of course, but he is being pedantic here. Being overweight is a sign of poor diet and lack of exercise. There's no such thing as a "mere" symptom. One only needs to visit a college campus and notice the enormous number of young people with middle-aged physiques to understand that things have indeed changed.

To me, there is a worrying causality problem in the Chronicle's article, and maybe in the book if the article is faithful to it.

- Paragraph 1 contests the statement S1 = "it is scientifically proven that being overweight or obese threatens your health".

- Paragraph 2 contests the statement S2 = "people designated as overweight or obese are indeed overweight or obese, according to scientific indicators."

When I read those two §s consecutively, I get the impression that S1 is wrong because S2 is wrong. Well, I would agree that S2 is, indeed, flawed, because the Body Mass Indicator is an old and inefficient indicator from the 70s. Yet this does not weaken S1 at *all*.

New indicators have shown up: the spatial distribution of grease on the body is now taken in account, and abdominal fat has been identified as much more dangerous than fat located elsewhere on the body. These indicators produce less aberrant classifications, yet the causal equivalence "obesity = threat" stays untouched.

My conclusion is that contesting obesity indicators does not automatically brings me to invalidate the relationship between fat and increased health hazard -- quite the reverse! In that sense, the article is critically wrong in its deductions, in my humble and tired opinion.

of course 'fat' is more of a symptom than a cause in most cases, but that doesn't change it's value as an ruler against which to measure well being since, one, it's very difficult to be 'fat' if one has a healthy diet, and two, fat people tend not to get exercise and lack of exercise is a cause of poor health. Type 2 diabetes is perfect example: people with type 2 tend to be fat because they eat 'bad' food and do not exercise; the bad food and lack of exercise is what's causing the diabetes but being fat is a good indicator of something being wrong and that's why it's completely legitimate to link fat with poor health.

While it's true that there are few direct medical risks from being overweight, a large number of common risk factors correlate directly with weight. So, e.g., if you are hypertensive, if you have high cholesterol, if your father was chubby and died of a heart attack at an early age, or if you are diabetic, you should lose weight. If, on the other hand, you are none-of-the-above, and you are OK on diet and exercise, your weight doesn't matter.

"Deconstructing" BMI seems to be a bit of attacking a straw-man, since it is clearly a "rule-of-thumb" type indicator, even if it may be overemphasized in popular culture (media) usage; but that's true of most things in the media. The whole issue of cause and effect may be aside the point anyway; the "merely associated symptom" of weight may be a very direct and easily measurable indicator for the average person to use to manage their overall day to day health, so why discourage people from paying attention to it? In any case, I'll continue to consult an MD for my health issues, not a political scientist.

Type 2 diabetes is perfect example: people with type 2 tend to be fat because they eat 'bad' food and do not exercise; the bad food and lack of exercise is what's causing the diabetes but being fat is a good indicator of something being wrong and that's why it's completely legitimate to link fat with poor health.

I thought of the case of diabetes immediately as well. Then I was astonished to read in the Times today that about one in every eight adult New Yorkers is a diabetic. Eric's a smart guy, but (not having seen it) I hope the book isn't an exercise in getting it right but missing the bigger point.

The one mystery that remains for me is why powerful economic sectors -- like processed food services and restaurant owners -- haven't fought harder against the obesity myth.

This isn't a mystery at all, because there's no conflict. Processed foot services are happy to provide all kinds of basically bad-for-you stuff in the name of diet fads -- low carb or low-fat or high protein or anything you like in highly-processed junk form.

A downside to blogging about two unrelated books in one blog entry is that the comments become harder to follow. I have a few comments on Mandelbaum's Foreign Policy article.

I think that the Nation Intelligence Council paper by G. John Ikenberry does a better job of analyzing the ways in which countries can respond to American hegemony. The only response Mandelbaum considers is for other nations to form an alliance to balance (or overwhelm) America's power. But other nations have a variety of responses which can make things easier or more difficult for the United States.

For example, Zapatero's victory in the 2004 Spanish elections certainly wasn't good news for the United States. Aznar thought that close cooperation with the United States would bring Spain sufficient benefits to justify the cost; Spanish voters didn't buy it. And that's one problem with Mandelbaum's focus on what foreign policy officials in other nations think (or, more precisely, what Mandelbaum speculates that they think). In a democracy, it's often what the voters think that counts.

About Michael Mandelbaum's book: "Rationalists don't buy the hegemon's motivations -- why provide public goods and tolerate free riding when an actor can coerce others into chipping in? "

The obvious reason is that the public goods being provided are extremely beneficial to the factions controlling the hegemon's behavior.

I think the criticism of Oliver should go farther than noting that that being overweight is an indicator of poor diet and insufficient exercise. most people know that 'overweight' means too high of a bodyfat percentage, and those with lots of muscle, like arnold, aren't included. (of course, steroids cause health problems too.) There are few 'conclusive' proofs in many of the diseases that kill people in rich countries. there are too many factors, the time frame is too long, and you can't force a group of people to do whatever you want to experiment on for 30 years. But there is a lot of evidence that excess bodyfat is unhealthy, however much the evidence is poorly transmitted to the public.

Kenneth,

Please recognize that voting for Zapatero was not necessarily a vote against U.S. hegemony. True Zapatero promised to pull Spanish troops from Iraq, but to my knowledge he has never suggested actively opposing the U.S.-led coalition outside of the highest level diplomacy. Thus if you're going to mind-read the Spanish, the most you can assert is that they voted against Spanish involvement in the Iraq war. (BTW, let's also recognize that a vote for Merkel wasn't necessarily a vote for U.S. hegemony, rather at most an acknowledgement that a little more rapprochement with the U.S. wouldn't be bad.)

Which I think underlines Mandelbaum's thesis: other nations aren't happy with Pres. Bush's version of U.S. hegemony, but they don't seem to be so unhappy that they're directly opposing it. They are using other strategies to engage and influence U.S. power, as Ikenberry does illustrate.

Of course Ikenberry also suggests that the other major powers are evolving their strategies. Which should caution anyone who thinks more U.S. unilateralism or isolationism would be good.