A letter to the editor commenting on a recent article about the growing obesity of Americans:

Judging health by comparing height and weight is idiotic. It completely ignores not just muscle mass, as your article pointed out, but any variation in body type. A person with short legs will be judged fatter than a person with longer legs, even if their relative percentages of fat is the same.

What this study shows is something that should be obvious by now: when they're not being maniacally patriotic, Americans like to be alarmed about themselves. There's nothing an American likes more than to be driven into a panic related to a deep-seated and well-hidden inferiority complex. (Sputnik! The Japanese automotive market! Obesity! Maybe next year it'll be table manners.) And then the foreign press reports these studies, because everyone else on the planet wants to be alarmed by Americans, or at least feel superior to them.

Paul

Ah yes, we do so like to worry about ourselves, don't we?