Do you have metabolic syndrome?

Weight loss is not a typical topic for Wired magazine, but this month they have a cover feature story on The Thin Pill.

The article is all about what's called the metabolic syndrome, "a condition that though only concretely defined five years ago, is now said to afflict as many as 75 million Americans – whether they know it or not. We sit, indeed, amid an epidemic of metabolic syndrome, a fact all the more remarkable because so few people are familiar with it. For this is no virus on the loose, no plague that has spread unchecked. Rather, metabolic syndrome is just a new way to think about a cluster of well-known and increasingly prevalent conditions. Metabolic syndrome is characterized by five risk factors: high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high triglycerides (fatty acids in the bloodstream), low HDL ("good") cholesterol, and obesity. Of the five, obesity – which is itself often referred to as an epidemic – is the most important, because the rise of the morbidly overweight is directly driving the rise in the syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is, in fact, almost indistinguishable from obesity – at least 85 percent of those who have the syndrome are obese or overweight."

The article debates whether 'metabolic syndrome' is a disease that was invented by the pharmaceutical industry in order to push diet pills at us in the guise of medical authority.