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  3. Could it be that excess fat is not, by itself, a serious health risk for the vast majority of people who are overweight or obese

Could it be that excess fat is not, by itself, a serious health risk for the vast majority of people who are overweight or obese

admin2019-08-01  21
问题     Could it be that excess fat is not, by itself, a serious health risk for the vast majority of people who are overweight or obese-categories that in the U.S. include about six of every 10 adults? Is it possible that urging the overweight or mildly obese to cut calories and lose weight may actually do more harm than good?
    Such notions defy conventional wisdom that excess adiposity kills more than 300,000 Americans a year and that the gradual fattening of nations since the 1980s presages coming epidemics of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and a host of other medical consequences. Indeed, just this past March the New England Journal of Medicine presented a "Special Report", by S. Jay Olshansky, David B. Allison and others that seemed to confirm such fears. The authors asserted that because of the obesity epidemic, "the steady rise in life expectancy during the past two centuries may soon come to an end." Articles about the special report by the New York Times, the Washington Post and many other news outlets emphasized its forecast that obesity may shave up to five years off average life spans in coming decades.
    And yet an increasing number of scholars have begun accusing obesity experts, public health officials and the media of exaggerating the health effects of the epidemic of overweight and obesity. The charges appear in a recent flurry of scholarly books. These critics, all academic researchers outside the medical community, do not dispute surveys that find the obese fraction of the population to have roughly doubled in the U.S. and many parts of Europe since 1980. And they acknowledge that obesity, especially in its extreme forms, does seem to be a factor in some illnesses and premature deaths.
    They allege, however, that experts are blowing hot air when they warn that overweight and obesity are causing a massive, and worsening, health crisis. They scoff, for example, at the 2003 assertion by Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that "if you looked at any epidemic—whether it’s influenza or plague from the Middle Ages—they are not as serious as the epidemic of obesity in terms of the health impact on our country and our society."(An epidemic of influenza killed 40 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1919, including 675,000 in the U.S.)
    What is really going on, asserts Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, is that "a relatively small group of scientists and doctors, many directly funded by the weight-loss industry, have created an arbitrary and unscientific definition of overweight and obesity. They have inflated claims and distorted statistics on the consequences of our growing weights, and .they have largely ignored the complicated health realities associated with being fat."
The author writes the text in order to______.
选项 A、suggest that being obese is not a problem
B、suggest that obesity is not as big a problem as many believe
C、point out that many scientists make money from studying obesity
D、point out that several diseases are caused by obesity
答案B
解析 属主旨题。文章首段提出疑问——肥胖真的那么严重危害健康吗?第二段摆出人们对肥胖危害健康的传统观点，但第三段对此提出质疑，认为专家们夸大了肥胖对健康的危害。究其原因，专家、医生们关于肥胖的不科学的定义是在减肥行业的经济资助下给出的。据此，正确答案应该是B。A项超越原文内容。C项与原文不符，尽管文章说很多专家、医生们对肥胖的看法是在减肥行业的经济资助下给出的，但这不是写作目的。D项只是文中提到的一个细节。
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