American culture tends to vilify fat and fat people. You mention a particular instance in 2004 when the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention appeared on national television claiming that obesity was approaching the No. 1 preventable cause of death. You think this crusade was misguided. Why?
Many M.D.s have bought this fallacious line that the optimal weight for women in terms of their health is what M.D.s call normal weight, a BMI between 18.5 and 25. And they have thought this to be true because women with higher BMIs exhibit a series of physiological measures that are indeed risk factors for disease in men. But they are not systematically risk factors for disease in women. If you actually look at the data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and data from studies done in other countries, the optimal weight for women who have had a kid is what doctors currently call “overweight.” I’m not saying that obesity is optimal, but all the findings show that overweight women survive better than normal weight women. We walk a fine line in the book because we argue that being overweight is not nearly as bad as your doctor has been telling you, but on the other hand, Americans are heavier than they need to be. There are diseases that still correlate with heavier weights, like diabetes. But if we ate a more natural diet, by that I simply mean the diet that we evolved to eat, we would all weigh less.
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/19/why_women_need_fat/
It's pretty simple stuff until you try to figure it out.
To me, true north for health starts with - what's your blood sugar? There's no one with out of control blood sugar that is healthy, but there are folks who carry more body fat than the minimum who are healthy. This author thinks you can eat grains and be healthy - some folks can. But if your health and blood sugar isn't what you want it to be, the best starting point is sugar and wheat elimination.
This article is a good read - another perspective on why you want to avoid those omega6 laden industrial seed oils.
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