Reminds me of “Pot is not addictive, I’ve been smoking it every day for twenty years and I’m not hooked yet!”

Standard, yes, but meaningful probably not. The healthy weight range they calculate for a given height is based on BMI, but it’s meaningless to tell a person that their “healthy” weight has a 35 pound range! If their “normal weight” is in the middle of that range, being 17 lbs over or under is a LOT.

It might make sense for a population to give that range, since there are so many kinds of individual builds. And that’s the problem with BMI, it was developed for population averages, not for individuals. To say that for 100,000 people who are 5′ 10″ and 50 year-old males that the measured weights of “healthy” people ranges from 130 – 170 lbs is perfectly reasonable. It makes no sense whatever to apply that range to an individual.

It’s a tried and true business model.

See Prozac and the SSRIs. My sister got on Prozac in the mid-nineties. She’s still on it and afraid to quit.

I’m going to try that one on my doctor next time I have a physical!

Her answer will probably include, “And what about the OTHER 30 pounds?”

Reference link to a very handy medical-adjacent calculator site, which also includes other subject areas.
https://www.calculator.net/

This is what it told me for my age and height; you can do the math, but don’t be tacky.

According to the World Health Organization’s recommendations, your healthy weight range is 94.7 – 128.0 lbs.

I don’t think the WHO is at all trustworthy on political or social subjects, but the formulas are probably standard, so I won’t get much different results elsewhere.
That’s a testable hypothesis, of course.

They’re creating addicts.

Yes, I know, “if they change their lifestyle, learn to exercise more and eat less, they could get off the drugs and keep the weight off”.

Very true. But if they could change their lifestyle, they could lose the weight without being on the drugs in the first place…so what are the odds of that happening? A few will, but most won’t.

I’m not a dedicated “prepper” but I do believe in planning for exigencies. I have emergency food, a generator and fuel, stored water, some cash stashed and I never let my gas tank get below half.

Fat is our body’s way of storing energy for lean times. I view the extra 40 pounds I’m carrying around as just another iteration of my emergency supplies.

“How Progressives Broke The Constitution And Praised Themselves For It”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/how-progressives-broke-constitution-and-praised-themselves-it

+ Bonus (from the peanut gallery):

“Peanut Allergies In Children Have Dropped Significantly: Study”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/peanut-allergies-children-have-dropped-significantly-study

Gotta feed ‘em peanuts while they’re young, it seems…

The BMI looks at height, weight, and age.
That’s it.
https://www.calculator.net/bmi-calculator.html

My BFF from HS was told, sometime around age 40, that she was obese.
She still looked quite svelte in smaller-sized jeans, but the BMI couldn’t lie!
It also was unaware that she had a Double-D bust.
Her husband thought she looked just fine.

***

During my first two pregnancies, all the expert advice was to cut back on salt.
So I did.
Then in the third one, the “experts” told us growing fetuses need a certain amount of sodium.
Oops!

Pregnant women were cautioned not to eat too much fat, until we were told we were eating too little.
Oops!

Spicy hot foods were a “no, no” for the gestating mom.
As my mother remarked: have you seen any of our Hispanic friends cutting back on their jalapenos?
Oops!

This is my favorite commentary on the experts’ advice:
This Is Why Eating Healthy Is Hard (Time Travel Dietitian)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ua-WVg1SsA

Best advice (Michael Pollan): Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
https://michaelpollan.com/reviews/how-to-eat/

Keeping up with the expert advice is an endless run-around — I gave up on the medicos long before Covid showed how morally, as well as scientifically, bankrupt most of them are.
Which isn’t to say I don’t look at the studies that we are allowed to see, and appreciate commentary by people I trust on whether or not the studies are credible or not.
Mostly, so it seems, not.
https://theconversation.com/flawed-medical-studies-can-end-up-in-doctors-advice-we-developed-a-tool-to-stop-it-253213

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40596-024-02021-6

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7673265/

And that doesn’t even include the Journal of Irreproducible Results.