How long, oh Lord?

I find this article fascinating. It follows a long tradition. Eggs are bad...eggs are good. Wine bad...wine good. Olive oil EVIL...olive oil health secret sent from God. The list goes on (btw smoking lowers your risk of alzheimer's) and on. What's great about this article is that Gerberding, one of the government scientists, is so opposed to the new findings. Her career, as well as the careers of thousands of other government workers and the budgets of many government agencies, are dependent upon the continued belief that people over a certain BMI have a higher mortality rate. Who knows if it was actually ever true, who cares? If, decades ago, someone decided that being UNDERweight was horribly, horribly bad for you, and a government bureaucracy was built around that, the same scientists would now be arguing about the dangers of being skinny. It's not about what's true, it's about what reinforces what people already believe and/or have a financial stake in. If this were a business matter, the companies involved would be under investigation now, and if this were a religous matter, church-members would be being pilloried for continuing to believe in a discredited system.