[perching_aix]

> example: "Healthy at any weight/size."

I don't think I need to invite any additional contesting that I'm already going to get with this, but that example statement on its own I believe is actually true, just misleading; i.e. fatness is not an illness, so fat people by default still count as just plain healthy.

Matter of fact, that's kind of the whole point of this mantra. To stretch the fact as far as it goes, in a genie wish type of way, as usual, and repurpose it into something else.

And so the actual issue with it is that it handwaves away the rigorously measured and demonstrated effect of fatness seriously increasing risk factors for illnesses and severely negative health outcomes. This is how it can be misleading, but not an outright lie. So I'm not sure this is a good example sentence for the topic at hand.

[philwelch]

> fatness is not an illness, so fat people by default still count as just plain healthy

No, not even this is true. The Mayo Clinic describes obesity as a “complex disease” and “medical problem”[1], which is synonymous with “illness” or, at a bare minimum, short of what one could reasonably call “healthy”. The Cleveland Clinic calls it “a chronic…and complex disease”. [2] Wikipedia describes it as “a medical condition, considered by multiple organizations to be a disease”.

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/obesity/sympt...

[2] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/11209-weight-...

[blackqueeriroh]

Please learn that the definition of obesity as a disease was not based on any particular set of reproducible factors that would make it a disease, aka a distinct and repeatable pathology, which is how basically every other disease in clinical medicine is defined, but instead, it was done by a vote of the American Medical Association at its convention, over the objections of its own expert committee convened to study the issue. [1] In fact, this designation is so hotly debated that just this year, a 56-member expert panel convened by the Lancet said that obesity is not always a disease. [2]

[1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/ama/39918

[2] https://www.newagebd.net/post/health/255408/experts-decide-o...

[philwelch]

> a distinct and repeatable pathology, which is how basically every other disease in clinical medicine is defined

Even if you want to split hairs and say that it should be classified as a “syndrome” instead of a “disease”, it doesn’t make a difference because someone suffering from a syndrome with an unknown pathology is still unhealthy. This isn’t a useful definition because there are many diseases we don’t understand the pathology of, such as virtually all mental illnesses. Furthermore, this definition doesn’t apply to obesity at all because we do know what causes obesity: calorie surplus. The usual counterargument to this is “we don’t know why people overeat” but that’s sophistry because you can always keep asking “why” longer than you can come up with answers. Alcoholism doesn’t stop being a disease just because we don’t know why some people compulsively drink to excess and others don’t, and a guy who drinks a bottle of whiskey every day is not healthy even if he is yet to develop cirrhosis of the liver.

> it was done by a vote of the American Medical Association at its convention, over the objections of its own expert committee convened to study the issue

Yeah, it’s a lot easier for deranged ideologies like HAES to influence a single committee than the entire AMA. This kind of thing is a constant issue and is why I don’t just take institutions and “experts” at their word anymore when they make nonsensical pronouncements.

[perching_aix]

Well I'll be damned, in some ways I'm glad to hear there's progress on this. The original cited trend was really concerning.

[yunwal]

Obesity has been considered a disease since the term existed. Overweight is the term that is used for weight that’s abnormally high without necessarily indicating disease.

There’s been some confusion around this because people erroneously defined bmi limits for obesity, but it has always referred to the concept of having such a high body fat content that it’s unhealthy/dangerous

[blackqueeriroh]

This is false. Obesity wasn’t considered a disease until 2013. [1] The term has been around since the late 17th century [2]

[1]: https://obesitymedicine.org/blog/ama-adopts-policy-recognize...

[2]: https://www1.racgp.org.au/ajgp/2019/october/the-politics-of-...

[typpilol]

Thank God.

It's so illogical it hurts when they say it.

[tracker1]

Only in so much as "healthy" might be defined as "lacking observed disease".

Once you use a CGM or have glucose tolerance tests, resting insulin, etc. You'll find levels outside the norm, including inflammation. All indications of Metabolic Syndrome/Disease.

If you can't run a mile, or make it up a couple flights of stairs without exhaustion, I'm not sure that I would consider someone healthy. Including myself.

[perching_aix]

> Only in so much as "healthy" might be defined as "lacking observed disease".

That is indeed how it's usually evaluated I believe. The sibling comment shows some improvement in this, but also shows that most everywhere this is still the evaluation method.

> If you can't run a mile, or make it up a couple flights of stairs without exhaustion, I'm not sure that I would consider someone healthy. Including myself.

Gets tricky to be fair. Consider someone who's disabled, e.g. can't walk. They won't run no miles, nor make it up any flights of stairs on their own, with or without exhaustion. They might very well be the picture of health otherwise however, so I'd personally put them into that bucket if anywhere. A phrase that comes to mind is "healthy and able-bodied" (so separate terms).

I bring this up because you can be horribly unfit even without being fat. They're distinct dimensions, though they do overlap: to some extent, you can be really quite mobile and fit despite being fat. They do run contrary to each other of course.

[pjc50]

As I see we're getting into this, we should address the question of why this particular kind of "unhealthiness" gets moral valence assigned to it and not, say, properties like "having COVID" or "plantar fasciitis" or "Parkinson's disease" or "lymphoma".