---

America's Moral Panic Over Obesity
...It's the classic pattern of moral panics. As public concern about the damage being done to the fabric of society by the folk devils increases, increasingly intense demands are made on public officials to "do something" about the crisis, usually by eliminating the folk devils.

That of course is the strategy for this crisis. If fat people are the problem, then the solution is to get rid of them, by making them thin people. The most amazing aspect of this whole thing, for me, has always been the imperviouusness of policy makers, and even more so people who consider themselves serious academics and scientists, to the overwhelming evidence that there's no way to do this.

I mean, there's no better established empirical proposition in medical science that we don't know how to make people thinner. But apparently this proposition is too disturbing to consider, even though it's about as well established as that cigarettes cause lung cancer. So all these proposals about improving public health by making people thinner are completely crazy. They are as non-sensical as anything being proposed by public officials in our culture right now, which is saying something.

It's conceivable that through some massive policy interventions you might be able to reduce the population's average BMI from 27 to 25 or something like that. But what would be the point? There aren't any health differences to speak of for people between BMIs of about 20 and 35, so undertaking the public health equivalent of the Apollo program to reduce the populace's average BMI by a unit or two (and again I will emphasize that we don't actually know if we could do even that) is an incredible waste of public health resources...

...People aren't dumb. They do the experiment, the experiment doesn't work in the vast majority of cases, so they quit until they get desperate again. Or (llke the upper West Side women) they stay on a permanent restricted lifestyle that the vast majority of people don't have the combination of willpower and social privilege to maintain. There's an important class angle here. Thinness is a sign of social status, and is to some extent a product of it, which is one reason -- probably the main reason -- why it's so prized, especially among women....