A timely book by law professor Paul Campos, entitled The Obesity Myth, exposes the weakness of the evidence that being overweight is bad for health and the dangers of the current obsession with weight and weight loss in the US. The obesity panic that has recently taken off in Britain has been raging in the US for some years. The obesity epidemic is the new plague and everybody, particularly of course, GPs, must take drastic measures to deal with it (although nobody has a clue what these measures should be). It reports the case of an obese 3-year old child dying of heart failure and other cases of children who require ‘non-invasive ventilatory assistance’ to prevent them from ‘choking on their own fat’. It offers an apocalyptic vision of a future in which the streets are thronged with amputees and the blind, renal dialysis units are swamped, and parents are obliged to bury their prematurely dying children. Nobody can accuse the media of hysterical reporting: the Committee report is itself seething with hysteria. Now obesity calls forth the metaphors of impending catastrophe. We can only hope that the new time bomb doesn't hit one of those icebergs from the old Aids adverts this might precipitate a tidal wave that sweeps over the Thames barrier and engulfs the mother of parliaments, together with its Health Select Committee. Remember the ‘ticking time bombs’ of HIV/Aids and BSE/CJD, both of which were projected to explode, taking up to the half the population with them, but which have continued to tick away quietly without ever causing the anticipated ‘nightmare scenario’. 1 Surely not, after all these years, the Chief Medical Officer is resorting to the same tired metaphor that has heralded numerous past health scares. Oh no, not another ‘time bomb waiting to go off’ - this was my reaction to the House of Commons Health Select Committee report on obesity.

Paul campos the obesity myth