from salon.com. you have to watch an ad to get to the article, if you don't have a salon subscription, but many of their ads come from the aclu, so it's not too awful.

i want to quote the whole article, but i'll just quote this part, on the statistics waved around by the weight loss industry.

Salon.com Life | The girth of a nation:

Do you base your argument on what you found in studies, or have you also reported out this hysteria by talking to people in the weight-loss field?

I started out by reading studies and again and again ran into the same phenomenon: There was this disjunctive experience of reading the data and not being able to understand how conclusions about the correlation between weight and health stemmed from this data. I soon found people who were willing to say flat-out, 'The reason you're having that experience is because those conclusions don't flow from that data.'
I asked a very prominent epidemiologist at the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] about the latest study that came out in March, claiming that 400,000 deaths a year are a result of poor diet and a lack of activity level. I asked her how accurate that number was, and off the record -- because she wants to keep her job -- she said, 'I think it's pretty accurate with a margin of error plus or minus 400,000 deaths a year.'