AMA votes to recognize obesity as a disease

Should be taxing the obese more, or be charging them higher insurance rates ... then you'll see those fatties drop the pounds.

Yeah, the disease of not eating right or eating the wrong foods all the time and not taking care of yourself in the exercised department.

Okay. That means that I had a disease since childhood up to university. What rubbish! This reminds me of educational boards acknowledging Ebonics as a language. Rubbish!

Look, I'm all for people eating more healthily and exercising, but what is "obese"? I'm categorised as overweight (but not obese) in Japan... but I'm average weight back home. Does that mean I go from "sick" to "healthy" depending on where I'm standing?

It just highlights how ridiculously arbitrary the designations are, and how they differ depending on political and social agendas. Sorry, but has the medical profession learnt nothing about the evils of bowing before political pressure?

Do some more research on where the line actually is between "healthy" and "sick" and then come back and we'll talk about this again.

Taxing these people more is not the answer, that will just make them more depressed, and then they may eat even more! So what do we do next, lock them up for their own good? Partial solutions are cutting back on the amounts of HFCS and sugar in so many products, and increasing the use of stevia as a sweetener.

Great, so now you'll have skinny people afraid to sit next to overweight people in case they catch 'Fat Disease'... nice one yank doctors... way to make overweight people feel even worse about themselves.

Should be taxing the obese more, or be charging them higher insurance rates

This is already done, actually. In America, at least, most insurance providers (health, life, etc.) require you to get a physical before they give you a quote on premiums. I'm sure that, since obesity is invariably associated with myriad health problems, overweight people would be subjected to higher costs.

way to make overweight people feel even worse about themselves.

Honestly? They need to feel worse about themselves. We are doing way too much as a society right now to make people believe it's ok to be overweight. I see people that weigh 300, 350, 400 pounds and I think to myself: Does their family not care about them? Their friends? They would sit and watch while their loved one eats themself to an early grave? To higher health costs? To lower quality of life? Furthermore, how could one allow themself to reach such a state? The only answer I can come up with is that they don't care about their weight, and that's a very, very dangerous thing.

Great, so now you'll have skinny people afraid to sit next to overweight people in case they catch 'Fat Disease'.

Most people realize that many diseases are not communicable. If it wasn't so embarrassing, that would be quite a slam on the intelligence of "skinny people."

You gotta be kidding me. A disease? Really? Good call taking PE out of schools and declaring pizza a vegetable. I guess we deserve this. Now at least when I am squished in between two 400 pound people on the 12 hour flight back to the US I can temper my frustration with the fact that they are sick, not apathetic and irresponsible.

The old "just eat less" which people bandy about isn't exactly a working strategy. When I started correcting my diet, my dietician put me on a diet with more kilojoules than I started with, but spread them out more throughout the day and selected healthier foods than what I was previously eating.

The key isn't "eat less" at all, it's "eat better."

Problem is, the healthier foods cost more than the unhealthier foods. My wages have a bit of a buffer zone, so I can afford to do that, but there are plenty of people on low wages who have no choice but to eat the unhealthier rubbish. Eating less isn't even a choice because if you eat too little, your body stores the energy for later, which just makes you even fatter.

If the government subsidised the healthier foods or taxed the unhealthier foods, the new difference in price would work in exactly other direction. Lots of previously unhealthy people would be forced to eat healthy because unhealthy foods would cost more (I guess this means that contrarily, the richest people would return to being the fattest people in society.)

I guess they are having problems getting paid for the obesity drugs and the surgeries and counseling. Best way to get paid is to make it a disease...