Obesity Fight an International Disease

“Medicalizing our social problems isn’t healthy. It undermines personal responsibility and renders important character-building virtues such as self-restraint and discipline hopelessly passé,” says Wesley J. Smith in today’s column . “Lowering expectations for individual behavior is the real ‘disease.’”

The American Medical Association has now declared obesity—not just the maladies it can cause, such as type 2 diabetes—a “ disease .” . . .  Redefining obesity into a “disease” illustrates how the powers-that-be believe we lack capacity to keep ourselves well. We need “the experts” to do it for us.

The AMA’s embrace of obesity as a “disease” should be seen as part of a far larger international effort to link the problem to other imperatives supposedly requiring bureaucratic solutions, like global warming. For example, a proposal—funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation—was  published  in the medical journal  The Lancet  (August 2011)offering technocratic policy remedies in the U.N. to prevent obesity that were nearly identical to policy agendas to combat climate change.  . . . what we see here is a large helping of politics, not just science.