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Are we using the wrong parameters to measure the epidemic of obesity?

Who is obese, who is overweight, and who enjoys good health? Before we can answer that question, we should first think about the parameter being used to establish the normal weight of a person. And to do that we need to go back to the teachings of to philosophers in ancient Greece.

Two and a half millennia ago, Protagoras taught that “man is the measure of all things.” Around that time, Xenophanes taught that each human group created its own “gods” (transcendental values) according to its own image. In other words, Greek gods looked like Greeks, and Ethiopian goods like Ethiopians, he said.
It can be said that Protagoras favored a kind of relativism and phenomenalism, teaching that reality is whatever each individual think it is. And according to Xenophanes, people create transcendental values (“gods”) using themselves as model for those values, and later using those values thus created to judge others.

That fusion of Protagoras’ epistemological relativism and Xenophanes’ sociological ethnocentrism reappeared, in my opinion, last week in an 84-page report prepared by the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment, about the epidemic of obesity in this state.

According to the report, not everybody is affected by the epidemic. In fact, there is a group of people living a “normal” life, with “normal” health and “normal” weight.  There report says those are young White people, 18 to 24 years of age, attending college or already with a college degree, and with at least $50,000 in annual income.

Everybody else who is not young, White, educated, and affluent is obese, or at least overweight, the report explains. That is to say, that African-American and Hispanic people, low-income families, people living in poverty, and those with no college education will suffer weight problems.

I want to emphasize I am all in favor of living a healthy life, eating a balanced diet and exercising. It is very important to take care of our health and our body.

At the same time, I think it is almost irresponsible to insinuate that only a certain group of people (those with the benefit of age and social privileges) will be able to live such a health life, while others, not having those same privileges, are condemned to a life of health problems, because they lack the education and the financial resources to live a healthy life.

In other words, as the wise Greek philosophers taught 2,500 years ago, the report uses as the parameter to measure a “normal” weight, as “the measure of all things,” a certain ethnic and social group, leaving everybody else at a clear disadvantage.

I will say it one more time: I am totally in favor of living a healthy life and taking care of our own health. But I am concerned and even upset when a message is being sent, even unintentionally, suggesting that unless a person becomes something he or she is not (young, White, educated, and affluent), that person will never live a fully healthy life.

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