Like I said, if you're going to factor in two extremes, then you'll have to consider the BMI and BVI tests equally to both areas. Even those tests are hard to read as well since it doesn't include overly muscular people or individuals with dwarf syndrome.
I'm not Dark Knight so I won't claim to know exactly what he was thinking, but my impression here is that he wasn't factoring in two extremes when he made that statement. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems you may have read his use of the term "skinny" (height/weight proportional) as a reference to the opposite of the obese, whereas he may indeed have meant it only with regards to fairly healthy, fit people who are relatively "skinny" compared to the overweight (who are the majority in the USA). He isn't talking about the folks who are afraid to eat an extra pea. He is comparing "obese" to "normal".
This could obviously create some confusion. This is just my interpretation, however.
I agree obesity is a problem, but we're too fixated on one area of interest and not as a whole.
I'd say that is far from the case-if anything, the problems posed by obesity don't really get enough attention and have not yet been fixated on at the rate necessary to solve any problems. Obesity impacts a third of our population-anorexia less than 1% of it. We do not have a skinny people problem in this country, our issue is overwhelmingly one of overly high body-fat. If you focus on obesity, you may not be focusing on "the whole" of the American body-health issue, but you are hitting 90% of it. Apply that focus to the opposite end of the extreme for the anorexics among us, and you're dealing with maybe .5% of the problem.
I do not think there is really a logical way around this conclusion-these are not equal concerns here. One is hitting us much harder and much faster than the other.
Or pick a hundred skinny (height weight proportioned not anorexic) and a hundred anorexic (35lbs or more under weight) at random.
No extremes are healthy.
True. A couple of problems, though.
1. I don't think anybody here tried to claim that anorexia (the opposite end of the extreme that is obesity) was healthy. You may be fighting a strawman here. The Dark knight, who you're responding to here, most certainly didn't.
2. Both extremes are indeed unhealthy, as you said. The issue, however, is that one extreme is much more common than the other. To use an example, obesity impacts about 33% of the American male and female population, and hits over 20% in the rest of the Anglosphere (Australia, Canada, the UK, etc). Anorexia, on the other hand, hits only about .5% of the American female populace (male rates are almost negligible at just 5-15% of all anorexia cases). We can go to about 2-3% if we include other disorders like bulimia.
In other words, we are speaking as though both extremes are equally heavy issues in our time, when in actuality one carries much greater weight (no pun intended) than the other. Obesity is the real issue, and thus it can quite convincingly be argued that it deserves the lion's share of the attention.
Anorexia is in no position to drag down average American life expectancy within coming years. Obesity is.
Because more people in our country are overweight doesn't make being overweight unhealthier than being underweight.
Again, this was never claimed.
And yes, while you can try to argue that both extremes (obesity and anorexia) should be compared, there actually isn't any comparison between the magnitude of each problem. Anorexia is rare in our society-obesity has become almost normalized. One hits a third of us, the other less than 1% of us.
It isn't unreasonable to give one more attention than the other given these realities. We can't pretend there is equality where there isn't.