Republican state Rep. Jim Knoblach of St. Cloud abruptly ended his re-election campaign Friday as MPR News prepared to publish detailed accusations from his adult daughter of what she described as his inappropriate behavior toward her since childhood.

The announcement came hours after an attorney for Knoblach denied the allegations in an interview. The attorney, Susan Gaertner, said Knoblach "does not want to drag his family through six weeks of hell."

Knoblach, who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, declined to be interviewed after being approached more than a week ago.

In a written statement, Knoblach, 60, called the allegations "indescribably hurtful" and said he would work toward healing his family.

About 40 years ago, Americans started getting much larger. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 80 percent of adults and about one-third of children now meet the clinical definition of overweight or obese. More Americans live with “extreme obesity“ than with breast cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and HIV put together.

And the medical community’s primary response to this shift has been to blame fat people for being fat. Obesity, we are told, is a personal failing that strains our health care system, shrinks our GDP and saps our military strength. It is also an excuse to bully fat people in one sentence and then inform them in the next that you are doing it for their own good. That’s why the fear of becoming fat, or staying that way, drives Americans to spend more on dieting every year than we spend on video games or movies. Forty-five percent of adults say they’re preoccupied with their weight some or all of the time—an 11-point rise since 1990. Nearly half of 3- to 6- year old girls say they worry about being fat.

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The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people. Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter. Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room.

The terrible irony is that for 60 years, we’ve approached the obesity epidemic like a fad dieter: If we just try the exact same thing one more time, we'll get a different result. And so it’s time for a paradigm shift. We’re not going to become a skinnier country. But we still have a chance to become a healthier one.

St. Louis County Commissioner Pete Stauber, the Republican candidate for Congress in the Eighth Congressional District, communicated with a key GOP group in Washington using his government e-mail address, according to a review of county records.

The e-mail traffic would appear to be in violation of a St. Louis County policy, which states “elected officials will not use St. Louis County equipment in support of their own campaigns for re-election, other candidates for public office, or political organizations.”

Stauber, a retired Duluth police officer, is locked in a tight race with Joe Radinovich, a former DFL state lawmaker, to fill an open seat being vacated by Democratic U.S. Rep. Rick Nolan, who is retiring.

The Eighth District, which President Donald Trump won by more than 15 percentage points, is considered one of Republicans’ best shots at flipping a Democratic seat in the entire country, and control of the United States House of Representatives could turn on the race.