人生の軌跡を綴っていきます


by yu-fen-sun
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Overselling the obesity epidemic isn't getting us anywhere

肥満についての記事です。

In late June the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched its LEAN Works Web site, a clearinghouse (手形交換所) of information on the health costs of employing fat people replete with (で一杯の) recommendations on how to prevent and control obesity. The site uses an "obesity cost calculator" to determine the added price of employing somebody with a body-mass index (BMI) of over 30, the threshold (境界、分かれ目) for obesity. The calculator asks employers to fill out a company profile including type of industry and location, employees' BMIs, and their wages and benefits. The software then estimates the "costs for medical expenditures and the dollar value of increased absenteeism resulting from obesity."

But is the federal government's endorsement (是認、賛成) of a device that essentially demonizes (悪魔化する) the 72 million Americans who fit the official definition of obese justified by the science? Dr. William Dietz, director of the CDC's Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity, defends the site as one weapon in the larger war on fat. "We see this epidemic as a serious threat to health and serious medical cost," Dietz says. "We didn't feel like we could wait for the best possible evidence, so we acted on the best available evidence."

Other experts, however, say BMI is a crude (大雑把な、雑な) tool that fans fears (恐怖をかき立てる) of an obesity epidemic even as it fails as a reliable measure of an individual's health. "We made everyone fat by framing! That is the real epidemic," says Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado who coauthored a controversial study questioning whether obesity is a true health crisis or a moral panic.

The American Heart Association lists obesity as major risk factor for heart disease because it raises blood pressure, increases "bad" cholesterol while lowering "good" cholesterol, and carries an elevated risk of developing diabetes (糖尿病), itself a risk factor for heart disease. In addition, obesity has been linked to a wide range of health problems, including cancer, asthma, and sleep apnea (睡眠時無呼吸).

Nevertheless, it's hardly clear that there actually is an obesity epidemic, or that fat people are at greater risk of death than people of normal weight, or that weight loss—relentlessly (容赦なく、執拗に) promoted by public-health officials as the solution to America's weight problem—is an attainable (達成できる) goal at all.
by yu-fen-sun | 2009-08-30 17:36 | 英語関連