(FORTUNE Magazine) – Why has the deponent spent hours the past week hovering over data on fatness? What is so fascinating about human blubber? What policy issues can it possibly illuminate? Since the editors around here allow only three rhetorical questions per paragraph, it could already be time to explain: We started up the adipose research upon suddenly discovering that the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was plotting to extend the law of discrimination to the overweight. To overweight airline stewardesses, in particular. Sinister move, eh?

As is well known, American Airlines and the Association of Professional Flight Attendants have been emotionally apart for some time on the slimness- trimness question. American's manual states: ''A firm, trim silhouette, free of bulges, rolls, or paunches, is necessary for an alert, efficient image.'' Sounds reasonable, one would think. But implementation of this standard led American to label some of its cabinpersons (most were women) overweight; and when some within this group failed to shed tissue at the requisite rate, they were canned. At that point, a group of women went to the EEOC claiming discrimination, and the commission turned around and sued American. But wait -- Keeping Up readers are expostulating in unison -- there is no federal ban on weight bias. How could the EEOC launch such a suit? The answer, nutshell brief: The commission figured out a way to argue that the weight bias reflected both sex and age bias, which of course are banned. In the suit, filed a year ago, the EEOC argued that the standards for women were tougher to meet than those set for men. One reason they were tougher, the argument went, is that women put on more weight than men as they age. In failing to adapt its standards to these ''biological changes due to age,'' American was engaging in age and sex discrimination. Elaborating these points in an interview with Keeping Up, one of the EEOC attorneys involved in the suit contended that women have special health problems if they fail to put on weight as they move past 40. In forcing women over 40 to maintain the weight they had at 30, American was not only discriminating on the basis of sex and age but was actually endangering health. Is the EEOC right? In looking for the answer, we perforce spent considerable time reading the views of Reubin Andres, clinical director at the National Institute on Aging. Andres is the EEOC's star witness, or at least it was his papers the commission produced when asked to support the argument above. In one important respect, however, Andres does not support the argument. He agrees that women are more apt than men to put on weight as they age. He also agrees that ideal weight -- the weight at which mortality rates are lowest -- rises with age. But Andres's data show that women's ideal weight does not rise more rapidly than men's. A more serious problem for the EEOC is that Andres's basic proposition -- the link between ideal weight and age -- is still suspect at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). Dr. Tamara Harris, a weight-mortality specialist there, says the Andres arguments still seem problematical on several different grounds. One unresolved question is whether cigarette smokers, who tend to have lower weights but higher mortality rates, are distorting the data -- and making it seem that fatter is healthier. Oh. By the way. The row at American Airlines was resolved in March, with a compromise. Despite those reservations at NCHS, the EEOC and the union got the allowable weights adjusted for age. Cabinwomen in their mid-50s may now weigh 20 to 25 pounds more than those in their early 20s. American claims to be happy enough with the outcome. It does, after all, still have some weight standards. The union has in the past demanded their complete abolition. Whether the manual will retain that line about a ''trim silhouette'' is, to be sure, a question.