e-Claire

Obese Police Agenda

f Tom Cruise had been accidentally decapitated in the making of the Last Samurai, he would have become one more victim of our "obesity epidemic." Sound strange? Welcome to the politics of fat, ...The first thing you need to understand is that in our twilight zone of fat hysteria, [Tom Cruise] is officially obese. That's based on the Body Mass Index (BMI), a measurement that separates us into government-approved, overweight, and obese categories by taking into consideration only our height and weight. A BMI of 30 or more makes you obese, and at 5-7, 201 pounds, Tom Cruise has a BMI of 31. ...Fatty Cruise is in good company. Thanks to the absurdities of the BMI yardstick, Sylvester Stallone (5-9, 228 pounds, BMI of 34) and Mel Gibson (5-9, 214 pounds, BMI of 32) are also "obese." So was Mark McGwire (6-5, 250 pounds, BMI of 30) the year he hit 70 home runs. And if politics is your thing, you'll be interested to know that the new governor of California (6-2, 257 pounds, BMI of 33) is obese, too. ...Here's how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains these counterintuitive results: "Overweight may or may not be due to increases in body fat. It may also be due to an increase in lean muscle."

OK, read that again: "Overweight may or may not be due to increases in body fat. It may also be due to an increase in lean muscle." Tell me how this is not doublespeak. No, really -- tell me.

39 million Americans went to sleep one night in 1998 at a government-approved weight, and woke up "overweight" the next morning, thanks to a change in the government's definition. That group includes presently "overweight" (BMI greater than or equal to 25) movie stars like Will Smith (6-2, 210 pounds, BMI of 27) Pierce Brosnan (6-2, 211 pounds, BMI of 27) Michael Jordan (6-6, 216 pounds, BMI of 25) Cal Ripken Jr. (6-4, 220 pounds, BMI of 27) President Bush (6-0, 194 pounds, BMI of 26). Moreover, the standard that we abandoned in 1998 had the virtue of distinguishing between men and women--something we now do not even attempt to do. The regularly recycled factoid that excess weight causes 300,000 deaths a year bizarrely assumes that if you die while overweight, you die because of that excess weight. As insane as it sounds, if Cruise were to kick the bucket for any reason, his death would count toward the mythical 300,000 total. ...$117 billion cost. 300,000 deaths. 61 percent overweight or obese. All wrong. Unfortunately, these bad statistics are the shaky ground on which a growing number of activist groups seek to build their nutritional utopias. The primary cheerleaders of inflated obesity figures are the self-described "food cops" at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, who advocate "sin" taxes on foods they don't want you to eat. An animal rights group called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine uses the bad stats to force a vegetarian diet down our collective throats. And then there's the American Obesity Association, which aggressively promotes these concocted numbers in its quest to have obesity classified as a disease for the financial gain of its pharmaceutical industry clients.

This much manipulation of the stats and of the very definitions/meanings of the words is not simple carelessness or ignorance: it is purposive. What is the purpose? A: To dangle something shiny and irresistible to argue about for purposes of distraction. Distraction from . . . ? B: To continue a process of desensitization of the populace to governmental control of the most intimate areas of their lives. Your theory?

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