http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/health/08cont.html?ex=1087272000&en=3bb8b
97b1971cb45&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

June 8, 2004
I BEG TO DIFFER
The Fat Epidemic: He Says It's an Illusion
By GINA KOLATA

sk anyone: Americans are getting fatter and fatter. Advertising
campaigns say they are. So do federal officials and the scientists they
rely on.

But Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller
University, argues that contrary to popular opinion, national data do
not show Americans growing uniformly fatter.

Instead, he says, the statistics demonstrate clearly that while the very
fat are getting fatter, thinner people have remained pretty much the same.

Let it be said that Dr. Friedman, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute
investigator and the discoverer of the gene for leptin, a hormone
released by fat cells, is not fat. He is tall and gangly, with the
rumpled look of an academic scientist.

As an obesity researcher, he might be expected to endorse the prevailing
view that obesity in this country is out of control. But Dr. Friedman
said he was outraged by the acceptance of what he sees as a hurtful
myth, one that encourages people to believe that if you are fat, it is
your fault.

The obesity arena "is so political, so rife with misinformation and
disinformation," he said.

Dr. Friedman points to careful statistical analyses of the changes in
Americans' body weights from 1991 to today by Dr. Katherine Flegal of
the National Center for Health Statistics. At the lower end of the
weight distribution, nothing has changed, not even by a few pounds. As
you move up the scale, a few additional pounds start to show up, but
even at midrange, people today are just 6 or 7 pounds heavier than they
were in 1991. Only with the massively obese, the very top of the
distribution, is there a substantial increase in weight, about 25 to 30
pounds, Dr. Flegal reported.

As a result, the curve of body weight has been pulled slightly to the
right, with more people shifting up a few pounds to cross the line that
experts use to divide normal from obese. In 1991, 23 percent of
Americans fell into the obese category; now 31 percent do, a more than
30 percent increase. But the average weight of the population has
increased by just 7 to 10 pounds since 1991.

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