The American Medical Association claims the body mass index (BMI) is "white supremacist" medicine, and the CDC says men can breastfeed babies. The public health establishment seems to have lost its grip on reality. How did this happen?
BMI
“…body mass index, BMI, then, is a continuation of white supremacist embodiment norms, racializing fat phobia under the guise of clinical authority.” Quite an opening from an article in the AMA’s new Journal of Ethics. Stripped of its rhetoric, could it be true?
Dr. Chuck Dinerstein and Cameron English recently joined Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris on The Other Side of the Story radio show to discuss the controversial claim that "obesity acceptance is ruining our health." Is that true, or has the public health establishment actually exaggerated the dangers of being overweight?
As "fat acceptance" gains cultural traction, a growing coalition of health care providers and advice websites downplays the dangers of obesity to appease social justice activists. LiveStrong offers yet another example of the intellectual tap dancing this charade requires.
Fat-acceptance advocates say medical terms like "obesity" and "overweight" stigmatize fat people and should be eliminated from our vocabulary. They're putting public health at risk to promote a misguided ideology.
Twenty years ago, an expert panel at the National Institutes of Health lowered the BMI cutoff for being overweight from 27 to 25. But a recent report suggests that for one segment of the population — postmenopausal women – that might not be low enough. Also, to define obesity in this population the cutoff of 30 might be too high.
Will "Adiposity-Based Chronic Disease" change personal behavior, the way the term "obesity" could not? Two scientific associations that made the switch hope it will.
When trying to identify why many young children gain weight at an early age, schools often are criticized. But a new, large study indicates that schools are being unfairly implicated in this regard, and that significant weight gain is taking place at home -- specifically, during summers away from school.
Prostate cancer can be indolent, not posing a risk to life — or aggressive, leading to an increased risk of death. A new analysis from the large EPIC study suggests that increases in BMI and waist circumference are associated with an increased risk of the aggressive form, and thus to an increased mortality risk.
According to a new Danish study, obesity isn't as bad for health as it used to be. More exactly, the BMI associated with the lowest mortality risk seems to be higher than it was 40 years ago. But given some of the problems associated with using BMI to estimate obesity, we're not so sure that these results apply to everyone.
It's well accepted that being obese, or even overweight, isn't good for you. But some data suggests that these states might actually be healthy — a situation known as the obesity paradox. A new study suggests that this apparent contradiction is tied to the metric used to decide who's fat and who isn't — the BMI.
Insurance companies may be able to charge higher premiums for employees with higher body mass indices, should the EEOC adopt this proposal as a rule. Meanwhile, a new study found that nearly half of Americans who are deemed either overweight, or obese based merely on their BMI, are actually healthy.