re: More Fatties Than Ever Before in the United States of Inevitable Diabetes

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but you can't separate when the discussion so often uses overweight as "unhealthy"

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Yes, you can. That's the point I'm making. Throw out BMI as it relates to you individually. I can tell you that my BMI is 24.4, just inside the range of healthy for my height. I don't give a shite. If I put on 5 pounds, and I suddenly slide into "overweight," it doesn't matter. I know how healthy I am. That's why I object to insurance companies using BMI as a metric to determine insurance premiums for individuals.

However, if a sample is taken and 20,000 people out of 100,000 have a BMI of over 30, that should indicate that the population as a whole has about 20% of people with a BMI over 30. Taking into consideration that a part of that 20,000 people, maybe as many as 1,000 to be generous, are body builders or pro football players or whatever and they are "obese" because they have a ton of muscle mass, that is still any indication that roughly 1 in 5 people in the population are obese.

As for other countries' obesity rates, you're right: we can't compare the US to, say, Zimbabwe. But we can and should compare it to other well developed Western Civilizations like the UK, France, Germany, Italy, etc.

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and of course no one will acknowledge how much malnutrition and poverty contributes to how awesomely thin people in other countries are

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The real problem is that people don't recognize how many people in AMERICA suffer from malnutrition, but on a large enough scale, even that is taken into account by a standard deviation. There's a reason why a range of Height to Weight ratios are used in the BMI to determine whether a percentage of the population is too thin, healthy, or fat.