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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  5
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."
How do critics dispute the idea that obesity is an epidemic in America?
选项 A、By proving that some scientists are funded by the weight-loss industry.
B、By disputing that 60% of Americans will die of weight-related diseases.
C、By disputing the idea that obesity reduces a person’s lifespan.
D、By looking at death rates caused by previous epidemics.
答案D
解析 属推断题。文章第四段指出：专家医生们认为肥胖对社会和国家的危害比流行病严重得多，对此评论家们报以嘲笑，并引用1918一1919年流感的死亡人数加以证明，而每年因肥胖而死亡的人数要少得多。所以答案为D。A、B、C皆答非所问。
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