More from the fat front

Jacob Sullum outlines the current situation in the war on obesity:

At five feet, nine inches tall and 175 pounds, I have a body mass index (BMI) of 25.9, which makes me "overweight." If I lost seven pounds, I'd have a BMI of 24.9, indicating what the government considers a "normal," "healthy" weight.

Yet that weight is not normal, since two-thirds of American adults exceed it. And judging from the latest research, it is not necessarily healthy either. According to a study recently published by The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), people in the government-recommended BMI range of 18.5 to 24.9 are more likely to die from a variety of diseases than people with BMIs of 25 to 30.

The JAMA study updates research by Katherine Flegal of the National Center for Health Statistics and three other government-employed scientists, who two years ago scandalized the public health community by concluding that the annual death toll associated with excessive weight was far lower than the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had been claiming. The CDC later reduced its estimate from 365,000 deaths blamed on "poor diet and physical inactivity" to 112,000 "obesity-related deaths."