Why Does the World Health Organization Want Everyone Fat?

Follow the money. That’s usually the answer.

Let’s start with a small political earthquake. In January of this year, President Trump withdrew U.S. support from the World Health Organization. The wellness-culture liberals promptly lost their minds. But as usual, very few of them bothered to look at the actual numbers.

Until recently, I assumed the American BMI system was something cooked up here at home — our own peculiar formula where a BMI of 30 counts as “obese.” Turns out that’s not really ours at all. The standard comes largely from the World Health Organization, and most countries — Australia, much of Latin America, and many others — follow the same grading-on-a-curve approach. And that curve is generous. Very generous.

The BMI cutoff of 30 effectively gives people a padding of roughly 20–25 extra pounds before they’re officially labeled obese. It’s like a school where everyone gets an A if they show up.

Now, critics today say the answer is to ditch BMI entirely and switch to waist circumference or other measurements. But the real problem was never BMI itself. The problem is the cutoff.

So I did some digging.

Japan: BMI 25 = obese
China: BMI 28
India: BMI 25
Singapore: BMI 27
South Korea: BMI 25
Hong Kong: BMI 25

Asia still uses BMI — they just use stricter thresholds.

If the United States adopted a BMI cutoff of 25, roughly 200 million Americans would suddenly fall into the obese category. Which explains why we never did it.

Asia, meanwhile, appears to have made a different calculation. Countries like Japan, South Korea, China, and Singapore understand something simple: a nation that wants to compete economically cannot afford to be physically dysfunctional.

The 21st century belongs largely to Asia. China openly talks about overcoming its “100 years of humiliation.” India has massive demographic momentum. These countries are planning for dominance. An obese population slows you down.

So instead of using the relaxed WHO standards, they adopted numbers closer to the Hamwi formula — the old American standard used before BMI took over. Under Hamwi, a 5’6” woman weighing about 160 pounds would already be considered obese. Under BMI-30? She gets a 25-pound cushion. Which raises an awkward question. Maybe the World Health Organization isn’t actually interested in health. Of course, whenever a system fails, we don’t fix it. We rebrand it. So now obesity has been declared a disease.

Apparently humanity mutated sometime around 1985. Once something becomes a disease, insurance must cover treatment. And those treatments are extremely profitable: Bariatric surgery, Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs, lifelong pharmaceutical management. Billions. Possibly trillions.

Meanwhile, health clubs — the very institutions that spent decades selling “fat-burning workouts” — are now scrambling to get medical staff who can prescribe weight-loss drugs on site. Think about that: Gyms spent 60 years telling people that intense exercise burns fat and solves obesity. Now they want doctors in the locker room writing Ozempic prescriptions.

Even the fitness media is quietly backing away from its own mythology. SELF Magazine — which launched in 1980 and spent four decades promising a new miracle diet and calorie-torch workout every month — recently admitted something remarkable: exercise might not actually be effective for weight loss. They quickly added that exercise has many other benefits. Which is true. Exercise is wonderful. Just not the “beat up your body until the fat melts” fantasy sold since the 1960s.

For decades, smart women followed every instruction: count calories, manipulate nutrients, eliminate food groups exercise harder and burn more calories. It didn’t work.

Eventually many women figured it out themselves. They rejected the whole system. That rebellion became known as diet culture criticism, and eventually intuitive eating. Intuitive eating sounds lovely. But there’s one small problem: it assumes people already know how to eat. Most people don’t.

Eating is a skill. It involves rhythm, portion size, bite pacing, meal structure, chewing, and timing. It involves understanding how the stomach actually functions. None of that is intuitive in a modern food environment. And intuitive eating has now been around for about twenty years. If it solved obesity, the problem would be shrinking. Instead, it’s exploding.

There is, however, one approach that actually demonstrated real-world results: 80Bites. At Florida Hospital, clinician Meredith Luce MS RD LN used bite-counting to help extremely obese patients — some weighing 400 to 600 pounds — lose enough weight to qualify for bariatric surgery. It worked because it teaches the one skill almost no one learns anymore: how to stop eating. Of course, the wellness industry hates that idea. It’s too simple. It doesn’t sell supplements, coaching packages, retreats, wearable trackers, or designer smoothies. But reality is becoming impossible to ignore. If the United States adopted the BMI standards used in much of Asia, about 200 million Americans would be classified as obese. Out of a population of roughly 340 million. That’s not a health trend. That’s a national emergency.

And the truly dark joke is that the only force likely to change it may not be health at all. It may be economics. Because when most of your population is sick, exhausted, and financially strained by medical care and food costs… They stop buying things. And nothing terrifies an economy more than consumers with no purchasing power.

What to see the bigger picture? Watch WELLVILLE.