You know, I've heard the term fat-shaming, but that is a pretty damn extreme example. A stab wound was blamed on being fat?
My wife informed said nurse about the stabbing. The nurse, like anyone who has performed tech support, is aware that people lie about what happened. Furthermore, diabetes is fairly common while stab wounds are relatively rare. She decided that the probability of my wife suffering from a stab wound and not being diabetic was less than the probability of my wife being an embarrassed diabetic who made up a story about being stabbed. She therefore stuck with her original hypothesis and worked from there.
I agree that it can be really easy to blame health problems on weight when there are more complex issues present, and the idea of blaming a stab wound on obesity is obviously ludicrous. That said, being overweight is almost always extremely unhealthy and a major cause of many illnesses. It's absolutely correct that there should be a lot of focus on that.
This is not true whatsoever. Weight and health have only limited correlations, to say that being overweight means you are unhealthy is ludicrous. This is well studied and known.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa055643#t=articleR...
"During a maximum follow-up of 10 years through 2005, 61,317 participants (42,173 men and 19,144 women) died. Initial analyses showed an increased risk of death for the highest and lowest categories of BMI among both men and women, in all racial or ethnic groups, and at all ages. When the analysis was restricted to healthy people who had never smoked, the risk of death was associated with both overweight and obesity among men and women. In analyses of BMI during midlife (age of 50 years) among those who had never smoked, the associations became stronger, with the risk of death increasing by 20 to 40 percent among overweight persons and by two to at least three times among obese persons; the risk of death among underweight persons was attenuated."
"Among all men and women, including smokers and those with preexisting disease, there was a U-shaped relation between current BMI and the risk of death, with the highest risk in the lowest and the highest categories of BMI. Overweight was not associated with an increased risk of death among men but was weakly associated with an increased risk of death among women."
Note that the highest and lowest categories were extreme values of weight for an individual and there were significantly fewer people in those categories compared to the others.
Moreover, the authors of this study even talk about being overweight vs. obesity in the discussion section:
"However, whether moderate elevations in BMI (i.e., overweight) truly increase the risk of death is controversial.2 Several studies reported no increase in the risk of death among overweight subjects even after those who died during the initial years of follow-up were excluded or subjects were stratified according to smoking status.25-29 Recently, Flegal et al. reported that overweight was not associated with an excess risk of death in the nationally representative samples of U.S. adults drawn from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey."
They go on to talk about possibilities regarding smokers with the data from this study.
Finally, it is worth nothing that this study follow those aged 50 and older and did so through the AARP's health survey and is specifically focused on the health of older people and that is only looking at correlations for individuals who are already at a higher risk of dying in the first place.
Please look at the figures, in particular figures 1 and 2 D/C. Among non-smokers, as the BMI increases from 25 there is an increased risk of death. You can see the trend clear as day.