A great article from the Guardian. Being the Guardian, of course they
had to say bad things about America, but the gist of the article, the
limited negative health effects of being 'overweight', is right on
target.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1200549,00.html

In 1853, an upper-class Englishman could be quite unselfconscious about
the fact that the mere sight of the urban proletariat disgusted him. In
2003, any upper-class white American liberal would be horrified to
imagine that the sight of, say, a lower-class Mexican-American woman
going into a Wal-Mart might somehow elicit feelings of disgust in his
otherwise properly sensitised soul. But the sight of a fat woman - make
that an "obese" - better yet a "morbidly [sic] obese" woman going into
Wal-Mart... ah, that is something else again.

The single most noxious line of argument in the literature about
obesity is that black and Hispanic girls and women need to be
"sensitised" to the "fact" that they have inappropriately positive
feelings about their bodies. Readers may suspectthis is a bad joke: I
wish it were. One University of Arizona study found that, while only
10% of the white teenage girls surveyed were happy with their bodies,
70% of the black teenage girls were happy with theirs (the black girls
weighed more, on average, than the white girls).