any money that people in larger bodies spend on medical care is attributed to their size—even if they’re going to the doctor for a condition that thin people also get, like, say, the flu. The condition might have no connection to body size, yet still it gets blamed on “obesity.” What’s more, estimates of the “cost of obesity” omit a wide array of confounding variables that could explain the association between body size and health outcomes, including a history of yo-yo dieting, the toll of weight stigma, and access to high-quality and nondiscriminatory medical care.15 All of these factors are
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