Author's Response: Time to forget about obesity

We would like to thank Prof. Manuel Gallar for his letter in response to our article ‘Population adiposity and climate change’. We were disappointed, however, that he focuses on ‘obesity’ throughout his points. ‘Obese’ is a medical construct used to describe an individual whose body mass index (BMI) exceeds 30 kg/m. Our article addresses population BMI distributions and, as such, we are more concerned with their central tendency (e.g. average BMI) than with relatively arbitrary cut-points in the upper tail of the distribution. We respond to each of his points below.