By MARGARET WENTE
Saturday, July 24, 2004 - Page A15

As I write these words, I am nibbling on a delicious crunchy cherry scone. I've been meaning to lose weight, and so naturally I feel ashamed and guilty. I promised myself I'd swear off these things, but I couldn't resist. Maybe I'll start the South Beach diet on Monday.

My scone addiction is no longer a private, personal failing. These days, it's a public menace that ranks right up there with al-Qaeda. Just ask U.S. Surgeon-General Richard Carmona. Obesity "is every bit as threatening to us as is the terrorist threat," he warned recently.

Don't think we're off the hook because we live up here in Canada. America may be full of blubber, but we're not so svelte ourselves. According to Statistics Canada, nearly half of us are now overweight or obese. And a third of our kids are too fat, a situation Statscan's senior scientific adviser calls "a public-health tragedy." Many doctors and public-health officials warn that obesity in Canada has reached "epidemic" proportions.

According to the experts, being too fat leads to all kinds of horrible diseases. The Centre for Science in the Public Interest says obesity is the second leading preventable cause of death, after smoking. "An obese person has a 50- to 100-per-cent increased risk of premature death," warns an international association of health clubs. "Fat is the new tobacco," says Dr. Anthony Graham, the spokesperson for the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

Are you feeling guilty yet? Is that a frappucino in your hand, or is that a smoking gun?

Perhaps you're wondering how fat is too fat. Let's just say that according to my BMI, I'm right on the edge. This scone could push me over.

If you don't know what your BMI is, shame on you. It stands for body mass index, which is a crude height/weight ratio, and it has become the universal standard for measuring obesity. Just Google "BMI calculator" on your computer, and you can figure out yours. According to the BMI, a 5-foot-4 woman who weighs 145 pounds has a BMI of 25. That makes her officially overweight, or, as it's now sometimes known, "preobese." A 5-foot-10 man who weighs 209 lbs. is obese. This means Mel Gibson is overweight, and Russell Crowe and George Clooney are obese.

Far be it from me to question the wisdom of the elders, but I smell a rat.

So does Paul Campos, who's written a scorcher of a book called The Obesity Myth. He calls the war on fat a witch hunt masquerading as a public-health initiative. He says that most of the obesity research being done today is little more than propaganda masquerading as science, and that almost all the studies that are alleged to show a link between fat and disease and early death show no such thing. He also says our obsession with weight amounts to cultural hysteria.

On top of that, he points out, the only reason nearly half of us are "overweight" is because in 1997, the World Health Organization moved the cutoff point way down the scale, even though, according to Mr. Campos, there is not a shred of evidence that people with a BMI of 20 lead longer, healthier lives than people who are 70 or 80 pounds heavier. Being really, really fat is bad for you. But being fat and reasonably fit is way better than being a skinny couch potato.

These days such views are heretical. Perhaps that's because so many people have an interest in defining overweight as a problem that needs a cure. When the New England Journal of Medicine published a skeptical editorial saying that the data linking weight and ill heath were "limited, fragmentary and often ambiguous," it, too, was blasted. "We got flak from just about everybody except the fatties," said the former editor.

Once considered a private vice, fat, like smoking, is now firmly entrenched as a leading public-health concern. All across the country, experts are being paid to figure out how to get us to take it off. There are endless studies about the causes and the cures of fat. The causes are said to include fast food, urban sprawl, cars, eating out, working mothers, technological advances in agriculture that made food cheaper and consequently increased demand, farm subsidies, the time people spend with TV, computers and video games, irresponsible small businesses that sell junk food instead of nutritious snacks, the decline of phys ed in schools, the lack of bicycle lanes, and even the amazing success of the anti-smoking campaign (because people who stop smoking often gain weight). The suggested remedies include taxes on junk food, class-action lawsuits against Big Food, better food labelling, health-care premiums on fat people, banishing junk food from schools, rewards for those who exercise, subsidies for health clubs, more gym class, and, of course, scads more public education. No one has yet suggested a public education campaign to promote smoking.

In truth, the chief cause of fat is prosperity. That's why the children of skinny immigrants from Korea are tall and strapping. That's why the Americans, being the richest people in the world, are also the fattest, and why they're getting fatter, and why the rest of the world is getting fatter, too. But the solution (other than winding back the clock to, say, the Depression) has not yet been discovered. Despite the gazillions and gazillions of dollars I and other health-minded citizens have invested in dieting, health clubs, weight-loss programs, treadmills, bicycles, and no-fat yogurt, we keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds. We are highly motivated, successful human beings. We're not dopes. We know our Food Pyramid. We can count calories. It's just that for 99.9 per cent of us, it doesn't work.

"Despite a century-long search for a 'cure' for 'overweight,' " says Mr. Campos, "we still have no idea how to make fat people thin."

This irrefutable fact of nature, however, will not deter the proselytizers and the demonizers, the moralizers and the food prudes. A deputy health minister told me recently that one of the biggest items on the government's agenda is stemming the tide of obesity. To which I say: Good luck, Bub.

In only one way is fat the new tobacco. Both fatties and smokers are the last people in society against whom we are allowed to rampantly discriminate. They are widely regarded as moral weaklings and their behaviour as underclass. Of the two, being fat is socially much worse. Try getting a promotion if you're really fat. Try getting a date. If we treated anybody else the way we treat the overweight, there would be a dozen human-rights commissions condemning us for it.

Which isn't to say that I am happy with the little rolls around my middle. Not at all. Statistically, my height and weight make me a completely average Canadian woman. But secretly, I know I'm pre-preobese. And I hate it

Put down the scone! Step away from the scone!
We have you covered!
I think she makes a lot of sense. My sister is well within the BMI limits, but she has bones like chalk and is prey to any illness that comes along, despite regular exercise and lots of vitamins. I, 30 pounds heavier, have strong bones and hardly ever get sick.

My 7 year old brother went to the doctor on friday and they told him he was 1lb overweight and should be put on a diet. My mother said look at him, hes skinny as a rail, all his bones stick out and people sometimes wonder if he eats enough.
They looked at him and admitted that he was on the thin side and still they insisted the cutoff is 55lbs and he is 56 lbs and needs to eat less.

BMI charts are worthless.

Oh, I so totally agree. They don't take frame-size into account, for one thing. Even if I were able to diet down to 110 pounds, I would never look like Kate Moss the supermodel; I would probably look like a linebacker for the Green Bay Packers who somehow got locked in a dressing room for the entire off-season and who survived by chewing on leather shoes -- emaciated but still fundamentally big.

Having said that, I have to admit that I don't really know what my "lower limit" weight-wise should be. I never used to weigh myself when I was a teenager, probably because I was afraid to find out what I weighed -- I know it was a whole lot more than my friends weighed, but then I was likely 6 inches taller than most of them. I am quite tall (5'10") and quite curvy, and I certainly wasn't fat then, but I probably weighed about 170. When I was an undergraduate (having no doubt gained that "freshman five") I went to the university health clinic for a checkup, and the doctor on staff recommended I lose about 15 pounds in order to "match the charts" more perfectly. I've kept that target weight in my head all these years, through weight ups (pregnancies) and downs (post-partum diets) but quite honestly I doubt that I will get exactly "there", or that I even should. What I'm going by is flab -- I've still got it, so I'm not done yet. When I've shrunk the belly roll to what I consider to be an acceptable amount, I'll have arrived at the destination. The number on the scale is arbitrary, and I refuse to let it dominate my life.

Good for you! Thats a great attitude!

I agree. The BMI charts are useless. I was always bothered by the fact that this BMI never made a distinction between women and men. Inch for inch, men are heavier than women, because they have more muscle mass. How can the same BMI be applied to both, except in the most general manner. I think the BMI was meant as a very general guideline, that's why your ideal weight is a range not a number.

As usual they used this tool and took it too far. They love it because height and weight are easy numbers to get so they can crunch numbers and make sweeping and totally meaningless statistics about the number of obese and overweight people.

There are much more precise ways of determining whether or not you are overweight or obese, but these methods are more costly and numbers are simply not available for large population. But the number crunchers NEED this information, so they rely on a better-than-nothing BMI system. In my opinion, it’s worse than nothing.

Any chart that says George Clooney is obese is obviously wrong.

Seriously, though, it's just a NUMBER! It's just like the thing they did with blood glucose numbers...diabetes is becoming more common, so what they do is lower the number at which they are supposed to "do something."

Which, for most people, just makes the problem worse, ie the high carb diabetic diet.

In a wonderful book by Pete Egoscue, who cured my bad knee, he explains how people search for the more complicated explanation, when the simple, right one is in front of them. "It can't be that easy," people say. When it is.

My BMI is about 24. A measure that does not account for body composition is not very useful.