A psychiatrist working at Yale University, George Mahl, counted and examined ten speech disfluencies (including the infamous "uh" and "um") with the purpose of measuring a person's anxiety level.  He calculated that, on average, during every 4.4 seconds of spontaneous speech, one disfluency occurs in a person's speaking.   (Source)

I heard a short spot as I was listening to the radio this morning that was encouraging everyone to visit the Obesity Action Coalition website and sign the petition to help make obesity a disease. The first question that came to my mind is, "how can you sign a petition to make obesity a disease?" It either is or is not a disease... signing a petition can't change that either way.

Also, could obesity even qualify? Let's look at the pertinent definition of the word "disease" from Dictionary.com: