When the leading cause of death in our country is something other than cardiovascular disease, I'll be more receptive to this kind of talk. Even if we were to indulge the author and assume the current definition of obesity is too harsh, that your BMI can be as high as 35 without an increase in chance of death, I would still argue that people in the United States need to be skinnier - from a mental health standpoint. I don't like the idea of a country of people who are slaves to their appetites & are convinced it's not mentally harmful to overindulge on a regular basis. We already consume too much as is; why should we be made to feel like it's totally ok to do so?Don’t expect those who have made their careers on fomenting panic to understand that our current definition of “normal weight” makes absolutely no sense.
I find it absurd that the author closes with the quote you pulled yet has this buried in the middle: So if there's "no reason to believe" that these weak correlations mean anything, why insist that our current definitions make "absolutely no sense"? This is just bad journalism all around.In other words, there is no reason to believe that the trivial variations in mortality risk observed across an enormous weight range actually have anything to do with weight or that intentional weight gain or loss would affect that risk in a predictable way.
Agreed, while it may not present a greater chance of death, it does invariably present a greater strain on resources. What the author seems to be saying is that a society of people the size of the humans in "Wall-E" is acceptable.