KEY POINTS:
Telling our kids they shouldn't be fat is making them fatter, says a leading academic who has been dubbed an "obesity sceptic".
University of Colorado law professor and author, Paul Campos, who wrote The Obesity Myth, spoke at the annual College of Nurses Aotearoa symposium in Auckland last week.
In two talks entitled "Obesity - fa(c)t or fiction? A critical debate", Campos challenged the 200 nurses who attended with his views on the "moral panic" he believes has been created in the developed world about weight and weight loss.
The panic is similar to the way "marijuana or the communist threat" was treated in the Western world, Campos told the Herald on Sunday in an exclusive interview. "A risk that is relatively small is being exaggerated out of all proportion."
And children are suffering most, the 47-year-old argues. "Telling fat kids that it's not okay to be fat, basically tells them they're not okay.
"We don't know how to make children thinner any more than we know how to make adults thinner, so we are focusing on a greatly exaggerated risk, engaging in interventions that don't work and do a lot of damage [to self-esteem], and we are doing it all in the name of health."
Campos admits obesity is strongly linked to diabetes, but he says there is only a weak link between being overweight and having heart disease.
Critics of Campos' theories point out he has no medical training, and therefore is not qualified to talk about the health implications of weight.
Campos says he has a background in statistical analysis, has studied the figures linking weight and health, and they simply don't prove that being thin means being healthy.
The passionate professor says there are many factors behind the anti-obesity movement in countries such as the United States and New Zealand. Three of the big ones are living in a food-obsessed culture which refers to foods in moral terms of good and evil; the large amounts of money involved in people selling weight-loss regimes and treatments; and a general anxiety about over-consumption.
But "weight hysteria," as he calls it, results in low self-esteem and unhealthy relationships with food for the whole population.
Campos has advice on the messages that media and government sources should be pushing.
"People who are active tend to be happier than people who are sedentary; eating a balanced and nutritious diet is a good thing to do; and you should avoid eating-disordered behaviour [such as] bingeing and purging, self-starvation and dieting.
"If you do those things you will generally be healthier than if you don't do those things," he urges. "But we should not tell people they will all be thin if they do those things, because it's just not true."
