The idea that 300,000 premature deaths a year are caused by being overweight was explained in detail in a letter from Dr. JoAnn Manson, one of the nation's premier obesity experts, to the New England Journal of Medicine. It's also accepted by Surgeon General David Satcher, Harvard School of Public Health Chairman Walter Willett, and the obesity research field in general. But Carnell ignores this, instead offering the opinions of NEJM Editor Marcia Angell and Steve Milloy, publisher of the "Junk Science Web Page." Neither has ever published an article, study, or book on obesity. That Carnell can do no better than rely on two editorials by nonspecialists in the field speaks volumes.
Jacob Sullum correctly replied to David Moshinsky's letter that studies show the thinnest persons die younger only because, as Framingham Heart Study director William Castelli told me, "The lowest-weight group keeps getting contaminated by people who lose weight because they have a chronic illness, usually cancer." I have also pointed this out directly to Moshinsky in a letters exchange in The American Spectator. He just doesn't care.
Finally, Thomas Cunningham is right that (my words now, not his), "Rubenesque" women are called "Rubenesque" precisely because they were the obsession of a single painter, and not representative of male preferences as a whole during his time. While fatter women have been more in vogue in other eras, studies have shown that men universally favor women with hourglass shapes, probably because they are genetically inclined to choose women who are more fertile and more likely to bear healthy children, and that means choosing a Coke bottle over a whiskey jug.
Yet I advocate a thinner America for health reasons, not aesthetic ones. Let Moshinsky fret about food police and Richard Klein talk lovingly of the allure of female adiposity, but obesity kills, cripples, and makes life less enjoyable. People have a right to choose this condition, just as they have every right to smoke a carton of Camels a day. But they also have the right to know the truth.
Michael Fumento
Washington, DC
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