Arbitrary because A) BMI (the measure that this article and all obesity crisis statistics use) is a nonsense number that for instance penalizes you for being tall (hey guess what happens when children grow up healthy? They grow up taller) B) the number at which you &#x27;become&#x27; obese has no real medical backing (partly because it&#x27;s a nonsense number.<p>The American obesity crisis for instance is largely because we dropped our arbitrary threshold down to the WHO&#x27;s threshold and gained some tens of millions of obese citizens in the process.