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While there are plenty of illnesses that obesity can help bring on or worsen, not everybody who is obese suffers from any of them. In the absence of such an illness, an obese person may be as healthy and live as long as, any in their cohort.

As a matter of public health, attention is much better directed to metabolic syndrome and circulatory disease, which are more responsive to interventions. Obesity draws attention because it is easily visible, and because people have attached a moral stigma to it. Blinkered public policy has led to there being overwhelmingly more obese people than the natural rate; fix policy, and the rate would return to its normal level.