NEW YORK, June 8 (UPI) -- A New York City obesity expert disputes reports that people in the United States are getting fatter.
Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University, says it is an urban legend that U.S. residents are growing uniformly fatter, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
What's really happening is that the very fat are getting fatter, he said.
Friedman discovered the gene for leptin, a hormone released by fat cells, and he also found the obesity industry to be "political, so rife with misinformation and disinformation."
Friedman points to analyses of the changes in body weights from 1991 to today by Dr. Katherine Flegal of the National Center for Health Statistics.
At the lower end of the weight distribution, nothing has changed, he said. Only with the massively obese is there a substantial increase in weight, about 25 to 30 pounds, Flegal reported.
In other words, the curve of body weight has been pulled slightly to the right, with more people shifting up a few pounds to cross the line that experts use to divide normal from obese.
