An obese person's cry for help

Helen Pluckrose writes in The Critic,

The western world has an epidemic of obesity. The World Health Organisation (WHO) tells us that worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975, that 39 per cent of adults were overweight in 2016 and that 13 per cent were obese. I, myself am one of the latter. WHO also revealed that most of the world’s population live in countries where an excess of weight now kills more people than being underweight. Most importantly, it tells us that obesity is preventable and that “the fundamental cause of obesity and overweight is an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended”.

We knew this, though, didn’t we? We knew that people get overweight if they eat too much and underweight if they don’t eat enough. There are certainly plenty of people who insist they eat very little and yet are heavily overweight, but it’s hard not to notice that in regions where people genuinely don’t have enough to eat, none of them are obese.

…This indicates that they should be offered practical, educational or psychological support to overcome the problem. It does not indicate that all of society, including nutrition scientists, healthcare professionals and cancer researchers, should be bullied into pretending that obesity is healthy and beautiful or that maintaining a healthy weight is an unattainable goal. Scholars and activists who do this are terrible advocates for obese people. I, for one, would like them to stop helping.

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