Just a few comments:
- "The Obesity Epidemic" is pretty made up. The definitions of "overweight" are mostly pretty non-scientific and were heavily lobbied for by the billion dollar weight loss industry to use unscientific definitions of what is "normal" and what is "overweight".
- Longest living expectations are actually for people in the "slightly overweight" category, which tells you all you need about the labelings of those categories. If you're "slightly overweight", you're actually normal.
- The "costs of the obesity epidemic" are also almost completely made up by lobbyists.
- Statistically, the biggest health threat to fat people is hatred of fat people. It stops them from being able to exercise at public without being harassed, and the constant commentary people around them "offer" about what they eat or don't eat is a significant cause of eating disorders and other mental problems like depression and numerous anxieties.
- Weight is an extremely unreliable measuring stick for unhealthiness. You can be healthy and overweight or unhealthy and normal weight or skinny. Sure, being overweight statistically correlates with several unhealthy things, but first of all let's remember, correlation does not mean causation, and more importantly, since we don't live in the middle-ages, there are much better ways to monitor someones actual health, and there's really no reason to use weight as a measuring stick for health anymore.
- If you actually want to create health benefits on the social level, encouraging exercise is good, encouraging weight loss is bad and is more likely to create massive amounts of eating disorders than anything else.
- If you want to encourage exercise, the best way is to directly support organizations and schools who want to organize sports, especially among the youth. Tax breaks have been tried and all they do is give extra tax breaks to people who are already paying for exercises.
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