The claim that weight is an important medical issue is not completely false, it's just largely false. At the statistical extremes of thinness and fatness, there's no question that weight has some relevance. But for the vast majority of people in this culture, and including the vast majority of people who are classified as weighing too much -- especially this completely phony overweight category -- it doesn't.

One of the things that I have been struck by, in studying this literature, is the weirdness of the assumption that the variation in body mass between individuals is a product of something other than their genetic predisposition to have a certain kind of body mass. Think of how bizarre that assumption would be in the context of something like say, height. The assumption that, say, Shaquille O'Neal on the one hand and Winona Ryder on the other, have different height because of lifestyle choices would be something that would just obviously be absurd. And yet, to a very significant extent, weight is just like height in that regard. [my emphasis]