We Are Not Obese

We’re a nation with a massively bulging waistline. Study
after study — not to mention personal experience — shows that’s true.
But a report released last week found that some obesity studies may actually
understate the crisis — because of people fudging their true weight
and height. Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health came
to their conclusion by examining two national surveys of girth.

The Harvard researchers combined data from the state-by-state
phone surveys and found that among men, 22 percent reported that they
were obese. For women, it was 21 percent. But the more thorough in-person
survey discovered that 29 percent of men and 35 percent of women were
obese.

”It must be that people are intentionally
or unintentionally misreporting their weights and heights," said
Harvard population health researcher Majid Ezzati, lead author of the
study.

from the Boston
Globe

Original study, from the Journal
of the Royal Society of Medicine (PDF)