Arguments Against Obesity As A Disease #7: Medicalizes A Behaviour



ABOM logoContinuing in my miniseries on objections I have heard against calling obesity a disease, I now address the argument that, doing so “medicalizes a behaviour”.

This argument is of course based on the underlying assumption that the root cause of obesity is a behaviour.

This is perhaps true at the most superficial level of understanding of obesity – yes, there are behaviours that can promote weight gain like eating too much, sedentariness and working shifts.

Note however, that nowhere in the WHO definition of obesity as a “disease that results from excess or abnormal body fat that impairs health”, is there any mention of behaviour whatsoever.

This is because for many people, the relationship between behaviour and weight gain is not at all as straightforward as many think.

Take for example physical activity – although over 95% of Canadians do not meet even the minimum criteria for daily physical activity (a behaviour), only 20% of Canadians have obesity (using the BMI 30 cutoff for the sake of argument).

So if behaviour (not moving enough) is touted as one of the root causes of obesity, why does not 95% of the population have obesity?

The simple answer is that for any given level of physical activity (or rather lack of it), some people gain weight while others don’t.

Similarly, if you believe that eating a lot of junk food (a behaviour) is the root cause of obesity, you will have to explain why not everyone who eats a lot of junk food has obesity and why a lot of people have obesity despite never touching the stuff.

No matter what behaviour you pick, it will never explain all (or even most) of obesity and there will always be plenty of people with those exact same behaviours, who manage to maintain a “normal” weight with no additional effort.

As I have previously outlined in blog posts and articles. “behaviours” leading to obesity, if anything, are no more than a symptom of underlying root causes of energy imbalance that can be related to a wide range of psychological, social and/or biological factors, with the precise cause varying widely from one person to the next.

Thus, equating “behaviour” with “obesity” only happens in the minds of people who fail to see obesity for what it actually is – a complex heterogenous often multifactorial disease characterized by excess or abnormal fat tissue that impairs health.

Thus, all that declaring obesity to be a disease is really doing is “medicalising” obesity (which is of course exactly what medicine needs to do) – it is not “medicalising” a behaviour because obesity is not a “behaviour”.

That is not to say that some pathological behaviours (e.g. binge eating disorder) may lead to weight gain. But most of obesity is attributable to “normal” behaviours in an “abnormal” environment.

And so once again, I would like to remind readers that obesity is not a behaviour (unlike smoking or smoking cessation – which is!) – see here for an explanation of the difference.

@DrSharma
Toronto, ON