Pro & Con Quotes: Is Obesity a Disease?

“If labelling obesity as a disease was harmless then it wouldn’t really matter. But self determination is vital when it comes to individuals taking control of their lives and making the best decisions for themselves. Labelling obesity as a disease risks reducing autonomy, disempowering and robbing people of the intrinsic motivation that is such an important enabler of change. It encourages fatalism, promoting the fallacy that genetics are destiny. I don’t need to quote randomised controlled trials and systematic reviews here because I have seen it the mindset of patients every day for almost two decades in general practice. There is an important difference psychologically between having a risk factor that you have some responsibility for and control over and having a disease that someone else is responsible for treating.”

“Obesity is not a disease. It’s ridiculous. It’s turning people into victims who need to be somehow saved — it’s all about profits for pharmaceutical companies. They want to turn patients into victims and say we’ve got a magic wand that will fix you.”

“[T]here is one cause of obesity and one only – eating too many calories. Certainly different bodies deal with food in different ways – some people seem able to eat a lot and stay thin whereas others appear to eat little and be overweight. But the fact remains that it is impossible to be obese unless one is taking in too many calories.

Genetic, psychological and metabolic factors have all been blamed for obesity. But while these may help to explain why people eat too much, none of them are the cause. There are no medical conditions that cause obesity. Thyroid deficiency does leads to weight increase but, again, only if too many calories are eaten…

We need an obesity strategy. It should say simply this: OBESITY IS KILLING MILLIONS, COSTING BILLIONS and the CURE is FREE. EAT LESS.”

“Considering obesity a chronic disease is a change from the current definition of it as a contributor to chronic diseases, such as diabetes – a change that has already happened in the US in 2013 and in Canada in 2015…

Arguments against classifying obesity as a chronic disease include the point that people would have to be treated only because their Body Mass Index is above a certain threshold, even though they may be perfectly healthy. This weakness of basing decisions about one’s health on BMI has, in fact, received much popular attention and was among the main arguments against declaring obesity a chronic disease presented by the American Medical Association’s own Council on Science and Public Health. Evidence has also emerged that individuals can be ‘fat but fit.’ Finally, in more severe cases, once obesity is seen as a chronic disease, individuals may be denied employment or insurance.

Classifying obesity as a chronic disease appears to be based on a flawed BMI tool that is ill-equipped to measure fat tissue versus muscle mass; the argument also seems to rest on the unsupported premise that calling it a disease will automatically reduce, if not remove, the stigma. Against this background, it might be wiser to stick with the status quo.”

“Public health officials want obesity categorised as a disease. What follows is that Medicare will cover the condition and you and I will pay for it…

Yet the solution to obesity requires one simple exercise: push the chair away from the table. Unfortunately, too many fail to exercise this restraint. As a result, nearly 64 per cent of adult Australians are overweight or obese. More than 27 per cent of Australian children aged five to 17 are overweight or obese. The figures in Britain and the US are similar…

Obesity is a big problem. An existential problem. Libertarians are in denial and the Left sees an opportunity to control the lives of all. The middle will muddle through, but the buck has to stop with you and your mouth — and your medical bills.”

“I often compare obesity to drowning. Would we consider it a disease if a person were drowning? When someone is drowning, it’s not a problem with their body: Humans cannot be in the water for an arbitrary amount of time, so the problem is a mismatch between the body and the body’s environment.

I think drowning and obesity share many important characteristics. Both are about an interaction between a perfectly healthy body and the challenge of an environment in which they are maladapted. In both cases, you’re exposed to something that’s initially a good thing, but you’re exposed to too much of it for too long. In the case of water, you need it, but too much of it for too long and you drown. In the case of food, if you eat too much of it for too long, then you get fat.

In both cases, absolutely everybody is vulnerable, but people are vulnerable to varying degrees. If we’re put underwater, eventually all of us will drown, but some of us are able to hold our breath longer than others. I think that’s true about obesity: About 80 percent of the adult population of the United States is either overweight or obese. That indicates that essentially, we’re all vulnerable, but we’re not all vulnerable to the same degree.”

“The American Medical Association (AMA) has decided to classify obesity as a disease. This decision is another example of inventing illnesses – a favorite pastime of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) – and another step towards eroding people’s autonomy and making them passive participants in their health. It is also an example of how the medical establishment is laying the groundwork to bill Medicare and Medicaid for every bad choice anyone makes, ever.

With the exception of when obesity is caused by a known pathology, such as hypothyroidism (which, while making weight loss more difficult, would certainly not completely prevent it), it is largely caused by poor decisions—like binging on food or eating lots of candy, ice cream or Cheetos…

Last time I checked, there was no known gene that would make people veer off into the McDonald’s drive-through lane or direct them to choose whole milk over 1 percent milk. No known gene can make you raid the refrigerator at midnight. No known gene can make you drive past six gyms on your way to work and stop at none of them…

The AMA, in classifying obesity as a disease, furthers the dependency, disempowerment and entitlement culture that is eroding scientific truth and personal autonomy in America.”

“When we meet obese people, should we cast them a knowing glance of concern and ask how they are doing? Should we send flowers and ‘get well soon’ cards to obese family members and friends?…

If obesity truly is a disease, then over 78 million adults and 12 million children in America just got classified as sick… Everyone has friends and acquaintances who now qualify as diseased.

Yet many sensible people, from physicians to philosophers, know that declaring obesity a disease is a mistake. Simply put, obesity is not a disease. To be sure, it is a risk factor for some diseases. But it would be as false to say that everyone who is obese is sick as to say that every normal-weight person is well.”

“Doctors should be required to tell patients a blunt truth: if you’re fat, eat less, exercise more, or both. And if you keep guzzling the tasty treats, you will die earlier. It’s not a disease, it’s a mindset — and that means it can be changed. We doctors need to be a little less understanding, a little more judgmental, and realise [sic] that our oath — ‘do no harm’ — must come before our desire to save the feelings of our patients. The truth can be the hardest drug to administer.”

“I do not consider obesity a disease. It is a condition, which may be associated with increased risk of certain diseases. It is possible to be obese and healthy, if one eats a balanced diet, gets regular physical activity, attends to other aspects of lifestyle that influence health, and makes use of appropriate preventive medical services.”

“[A]s a disease, obesity is a flawed construct. Consider, for a moment, some of the awkward questions that arise when you call obesity a disease: is someone who is slightly overweight, only slightly diseased? Can someone catch or ‘come down’ with obesity? Can obesity really be ‘cured’? If these questions seem ludicrous, it is because obesity does not readily meet the criteria of disease. According to Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, a disease is ‘an interruption, cessation, or disorder of body function, system, or organ.’ By this definition, if obesity is a disease, then we must assume that, at some level, body fat is pathological. Yet… there is no clear evidence about what level or even how, exactly, adipose tissue is harmful to our health. For some extremely heavy people, their body fat may disrupt their ability to function, particularly their ability to exercise, but for most people their fatness is not a disorder. Indeed, body fat on some parts of the body, such as the thighs, can actually be helpful to sustaining our health. Even Stedman’s Medical Dictionary does not call obesity a disease; it is simply known as ‘excess subcutaneous fat in proportion to lean body mass’ or, at worst, ‘a public health problem.'”

“The pharmaceutical and weight loss industry have manufactured an ‘epidemic’ to have the cost of their weight loss drugs and treatments underwritten by taxpayers… Obesity is not a ‘disease’ if it can be cured by taking regular walks and eating less… We need to be careful not to dumb down the definition of the term disease at the expense of taxpayers.”

“Obesity itself cannot be considered an illness. The most common cause is caloric intake that is persistently higher than caloric output. Reimbursement may not be made for treatment of obesity alone since this treatment cannot be considered reasonable and necessary for the diagnosis or treatment of an illness or injury. However, although obesity is not in itself an illness, it may be caused by illnesses such as hypothyroidism, Cushing’s disease, and hypothalamic lesions. In addition, obesity can aggravate many cardiac and respiratory diseases as well as diabetes and hypertension. Therefore, services related to the treatment of obesity could be covered services when such services are an integral and necessary part of a course of treatment for one of these illnesses.”

“The term ‘obesity’ has metamorphosed over the years from simply describing a state of fatness to now being synonymous with disease and death. A thorough and unbiased closer look, however, reveals that obesity is, in fact, not a disease at all.

First of all, many of the medical conditions, including mortality, associated with obesity are actually a result of sedentary lifestyle and poor food choices…

Second, a significant source of decreased health on the body is cyclical weight-loss dieting and fad diets… In contrast, increased mobility through mild but maintainable activity, in combination with improved food choices, decreases stress and increases health and energy, whether or not actual weight is lost.”

“From the perspective of a profit-maximizing medical and pharmaceutical industry… the ideal disease would be one that never killed those who suffered from it, that could not be treated effectively, and that doctors and their patients would nevertheless insist on treating anyway. Luckily for it, the American health-care industry has discovered (or rather invented) just such a disease. It is called ‘obesity.’

The reasons why the disease of obesity doesn’t kill those who suffer from it and why it remains impossible to cure are one and the same: Because it doesn’t exist.

…Most groups of people categorized as ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’ do not suffer from poorer health or higher mortality than ‘ideal weight’ individuals. In many of the largest-scale studies, groups of people currently categorized as overweight have better mortality statistics than anyone else.”

“Is obesity really a disease?… I argue that it’s not a disease at all but rather the natural result of a person making extremely poor decisions about food choice and physical exercise. It’s something that can be entirely reversed in virtually 100% of the cases by changing these two simple things. As a result, it rests firmly under the control of the patient, especially if they are educated about healthy nutrition and how to make intelligent choices about what foods and groceries they consume.

To call obesity a disease is a ‘dumbing down’ of the very idea of what a disease is. And unfortunately, it implies that the patient is helpless to do anything about it.”