Great article by Bruce Weber on the President of the Cooper Institute, a non-profit organization in Dallas dedicated to research on the relationship between living habits and health:

“I’m a short, fat guy who runs every day,” Dr. Blair said in a recent phone interview. “I’ve run tens of thousands of miles over the past 40 years, and in that time I’ve gained 30 pounds.”

This doesn’t exactly please Dr. Blair. (People who are skinny and never exercise “are going straight to hell,” he said, “because they’re living in paradise now.”) But he was using himself, he said, to illustrate why the federal government’s new physical activity recommendations, which are clearly aimed at the alarming rise in obesity in America, are misleading. Even though he has been doing what the guidelines advise for decades, it hasn’t controlled his weight.