Washington, DC – Last week’s bombshell news that deaths in America from excess weight are only one-fifteenth of the government’s earlier bloated conclusion has led numerous editorial pages, including The New York Times, Newsday, Rocky Mountain News, and Des Moines Register, to call on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to explain how it got obesity so wrong. The Baltimore Sun’s editorial page called the CDC’s 400,000 obesity deaths estimate “The Chicken Little scare of 2004.”
Today The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) is running coast to coast full-page advertisements skewering obesity hype in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and right in the CDC’s own backyard in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The ad will also be running in all cars in the Washington D.C. Metro subway system.
“For months we have been pushing the CDC to rescind its wildly exaggerated claim that obesity kills 400,000 people a year,” said CCF senior analyst Dan Mindus. “It is now time for the agency to act by endorsing the research released last week as a much more accurate picture of obesity and explaining its earlier major errors which led to unwarranted hysteria.”
