For all its prominence in public health, there’s little real understanding of overeating, being overweight, and how these things connect to each other and to illness. Last week, a widely circulated piece in the Huffington Post stated the obvious — “Smoking is a behavior, being fat is not” — which apparently needed to be pointed out because these factors so often appear together as the primary reasons to blame people for the high cost of health care.
There’s a powerful cultural prejudice that overeating causes people to be overweight, and being overweight causes people to get sick and die. But this is an assumption, not a scientific observation. The assumption made it easy to believe the claims of America’s most celebrated overeating expert, Cornell’s Brian Wansink, whose headline-making work had propelled him into a prominent role in reshaping school lunches under the Obama administration.
