All this yammering about obesity a big, fat lie.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Tova Stabin For The Register-Guard

I surely support efforts to ensure that children eat healthy food and spend less time in front of screens and more actively playing. I am afraid, however, of the growing belief that so-called obesity, supposedly caused by overeating and lack of exercise, is the problem we must solve to make our children healthy and happy.

As I often tell my young son, people come in different sizes and shapes.

More than 300 studies since the late 1960s have shown that fat people have exactly the same range of eating patterns as thin people: the same variety of amounts eaten, the same times of day eaten, the same types and kinds of foods eaten, the same reasons given for eating, etc. In not one study could fat people or thin people be differentiated by what, how much, when or why they ate.

A study in the Canadian Journal of Public Health explains, "When food intakes of obese individuals were accurately assessed and compared with people of normal weights, the intakes were identical. There are thin people who eat excessively ... and there are fat people who eat too much. Likewise, there are thin people and fat people who have small appetites."

Correlations between being fat and diseases are, at best, contradictory and confusing. As reported in the British Medical Journal, researchers were trying to show a positive correlation between high calorie intakes, fatness and diabetes, but were surprised to find fatness and high levels of blood sugar correlated with below-average calorie intakes.

What I find scary is the multibillion dollar diet industry (one study estimates that Americans spend an average of $109 million on dieting and diet-related products each day). The diet industry feeds off inaccurate ideas about correlations between fat and health.

Constant dieting is a much more significant health risk than so-called "obesity." Vivian Mayer, in "The Questions People Ask," summarizes numerous medical studies as saying that, "Repeated dieting has been shown to cause arteriosclerosis in rats and is generally regarded as increasing the risk of heart attacks and strokes in humans. Weight loss involves destruction of protein as well as fat tissue, and so duplicates the tissue damage of starvation.

`Not fatness, but efforts to lose weight, have been correlated with nutritional behaviors called `compulsive eating,' Furthermore, dieting and social pressure to hate oneself for being fat are conspicuously absent in the histories of fat people noted for long life and good health."

Other studies show that in a three- to five-year period after weight loss, 92 percent to 98 percent of everyone who loses weight will gain it back; 90 percent will gain back more than they lost.

Chronic (and often secretive) dieting by our children, especially girls, is a short leap to anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and related disorders. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, between 5 million and 10 million girls and women, along with 1 million boys and men, suffer from eating disorders. Estimates suggest as many as 15 percent of young women adopt unhealthy attitudes and behaviors about food.

There are studies that estimate that 40 percent of first-, second- and third-grade girls want to be thinner! Eighty percent of 10-year-olds are worried they will become fat. Recently, there has been an increase in boys with eating disorders.

Since most people are secretive about these behaviors, statistics may be much higher than reported. Ironically, children and adults with these disorders often get support and praise for losing so much weight; tragically, their eating disorders can be undiscovered until they are severe (with effects that can include hospitalization and death).

For children and adults who may not fit contemporary standards of thinness, for those who are "naturally" thin but destroy their health with junk food and lack of exercise, and everyone in between, the strict association of body size with eating, exercise and health can be dangerous - indeed, sometimes fatal. To add more fuel by ostracizing children perceived as above "normal" weight is cruel, as well as unhealthy for everyone.

Encourage your children to enjoy eating; have a meal together; grow a garden; avoid junk food; shut off the TV or computer; dance around the house; go to the park and play ball; join a sports team or dance group. Then tell them their bodies are beautiful no matter what their size or shape. That will make for healthy bodies for all our children.

Tova Stabin is a free-lance writer, teacher and librarian. She was a medical research librarian in the University of Washington's School of Public Health for 13 years.