When is Obesity a Public Health Issue?

The August issue of Reason magazine has a cover story on the ongoing "Obesity Epidemic" which will continue to fester for quite some time yet. The article discusses the history of soi-disant social activists pushing for more government involvement in the personal lives of individual Americans.

As an exercise, I plugged my own figures into the BMI calculation, to find that I'm technically considered obese (BMI 30.4). This was a bit disturbing, as I know I'm overweight, but not hugely so (pun unintentional). So, I plugged in the numbers for just before I got married, when I was almost literally starving, and found that that weight was considered "ideal" (BMI 21.5). This little exercise has persuaded me that BMI as an analysis tool is significantly flawed. . .

. . . at least as an individual tool for gauging your own health. As a "public health" tool, it's remarkably useful — for sowing fear, uncertainty, doubt, and (possibly) mass self-loathing. The kind of tool a soul-dead bureaucrat loves to have available.

It's good to have a way of scaring the public and whipping up interest in the media to broadcast your current crusade, but is it actually something relevant to most peoples' lives?

Jacob Sullum's article discusses the whole issue in some detail.