Among the most egregious of such myths being Jamie Oliver’s claims that “the young generation is the first that will die younger than their parents” and that some people are “vomiting their own shit” due to their obesity. That is pure, unalloyed horeshit that a media with no real scientific understanding allows to be promulgated to a populace who will believe it, simply because there is no correcting, sober discourse on the subject.

And not only is there a single message being delivered, but there are coercive policies on the table that would tax people’s eating habits, ban particular foods and many other interferences that are simply not justifiable on scientific grounds.

Taken in the round, the hypothesis that “obesity is bad” is on very shakey ground. There is no correlation between high BMI as a predictor of most diseases commonly attributed to it as study after study after study has found.

So back to the point: where is the corresponding nuance in the public health message? There is none. The science has been highjacked by vested interests in government, the media and industry who wish to exert their influence over our lives for a variety of motivations.

That is not a grown up, rational or scientific approach to either public health or policy.

Except that science doesn’t proceed like that, not really. Of course a single negative result can disprove a hypothesis deductively, but if you mean to use this as a model for actual scientific practice, you are barking up the wrong tree. In the world of real science, induction (ie empirical confirmation of a hypothesis) is used all the time. And that’s just fine.

Right, generalities out the way, let’s look at your hypothesis: ‘obesity is a risk factor in health’. Is this one that could be deductively refuted by a single experiment? No, because it is not of the form ‘all x are y’. (Indeed, most scientific hypotheses are not of this form.) The deductive refutation method doesn’t work at all in your example: real studies will look for correlations between (eg) BMI and heart disease. Some studies will find one, but some may not and we have to decide how to take things forward. But this is in no way equivalent to (eg) finding 100 white swans and 1 black swan and taking the hypothesis ‘all swans are white’ as refuted.

Also, your hypothesis itself (‘obesity is a risk factor in health’) is so imprecise that even if we took the very various studies you reference as conclusive in the specific areas of health each one looks at, it would still be possible that obesity is a risk factor in another aspect of health.

“Cuba and the era of the bicycle”

So, umm, that’s what they’re going to be suggesting as the solution, right?

Although, I’ve read that BMI is flawed, so I wonder if they could use a better metric…