Changing the meaning of words

Junk Food Science, a blog I discovered earlier this week while reading something about last week's episode of House, has an appalling entry that everyone should read. It's about India, a country with disturbing levels of malnutrition and hunger, has managed to be reclassified as the home of an incipient "obesity epidemic."

How do you create an obesity epidemic in a country with nearly the lowest percentage of “obese” people in the world?

You begin by changing the definition.

On Tuesday, Health Ministry officials in India released the country’s first Guidelines for the Prevention and Management of Obesity and Metabolic Syndrome. It begins by making significant departures from World Health Organization definitions for overweight and obesity. According to new cutoffs enacted by Indian health officials, anyone with a body mass index of 23 kg/m2 is now labeled as overweight. And a BMI of 25 and over is now defined as obese — considerably more stringent than the international cut-off of a BMI 30.

These are the same kinds of tactics I've been reading about for years. At least three times in my lifetime the definition of overweight and obesity has changed, causing people who went to bed at a "normal weight" to wake up with a "medical problem".

I strongly recommend this post and also the excellent book The Obesity Myth, which includes a fantastic look at the economics of "obesity" and who exactly is making billions of dollars from manufactured hysteria.