Calling obesity a disease is a ploy to generate profits

Sunday, November 09, 2003 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: obesity, calling obesity a disease, classify obesity as a disease

There's a lobbying effort underway to classify obesity as a disease. But to understand what's behind this effort, you have to examine the politics. As always, it's all about money: getting obesity classified as a disease opens up the doors to forcing insurance companies to pay for anti-obesity drugs, products and services.

The very fact that we even have an American Obesity Association (AOA) is rather frightening in the first place. The second fact that the AOA has Slim-Fast as one of its members is even more shocking (Slim-Fast powder uses refined sugar as it's #1 ingredient and, in the opinion of many nutritionists, it promotes obesity rather than reversing it).

So let's jump to the chase: is obesity really a disease? Hardly. It's the result of overeating processed foods and avoiding exercise. That's not a disease in the sense that, for example, Malaria is a disease.

The trend towards labeling every unwanted behavior a disease is actually a ploy to shift responsibility for obesity out of the hands of patients and into the hands of doctors. When you call something a disease, you imply that the patient has no control over it (which is blatantly false) and that only qualified doctors can treat it (which is also hogwash).

Let's get real, folks: finding a healthy body weight is the sole responsibility of each individual and has nothing to do with "disease" or invasion by microbes. Doctors can help, of course, by educating patients on making wise food choices and engaging in daily exercise, but it is ultimately the patient who must decide what kind of health outcome they wish to create. The doctor cannot control a patient's body fat.

All this doesn't mean that losing weight is easy, or that nature hasn't programmed your body to store a year's worth of caloric energy in the form of body fat. Because, in reality, your body is programmed to work against you: it wants you to overeat and doesn't want you to go on a diet and lose weight.

But today, we have all sorts of workable solutions for losing weight. Hoodia gordonii turns off your appetite, allowing you to lose weight naturally, without all the jittery side effects of caffeine supplements.

Fitness programs, aerobics classes, and plain old walking paths give us easy access to forms of exercise that keep body weight under control. And now, thanks to good information on the Internet about nutrition and foods (along with the help of a long list of couragous authors, researchers and pioneering doctors), a person who wants to learn how to eat healthy can rather easily do so.

Education is what will solve the obesity problem. The free flow information is the answer, not some profit-minded effort to classify obesity as a disease.

Make no mistake: calling obesity a disease will do nothing to reverse the problem at a national level, but it will certainly enrich a small group of companies who strongly desire to profit from the suffering of overweight people.