Overweight People Live Longer
I think we are so awash in "scientific studies"--many hyper-politicized or contradictory with other studies--that it seems to me that they offer little of value any more. For example, some researchers claim that calorie deprivation can extend lives. But a now verified study from two years ago says that overweight people live longer than the under and normal weight, as well as the obese. From the New York Times story:
About two years ago, a group of federal researchers reported that overweight people have a lower death rate than people who are normal weight, underweight or obese. Now, investigating further, they found out which diseases are more likely to lead to death in each weight group.What to believe? It's hard to know, but as someone who is overweight but not obese, I'll hang my hat on this particular hook!
Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights, they report that overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease.
As a consequence, the group from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute reports, there were more than 100,000 fewer deaths among the overweight in 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, than would have expected if those people had been of normal weight.
Their paper is published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Labels: Scientific Studies.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 8:23 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
There's been so much nonsense over the "obesity epidemic" it's hard to separate fact from fantasy. And, for that matter, food, eating, diet, and disease in general. I think there is a lot of quackery going on in this area.
The best read out there is Paul Campos' The Diet Myth (aka The Obesity Myth). He takes the CW over the so-called epidemic down a few pegs.
There is a correlation causation problem with all of the obesity studies that, sadly, isn't as favorable to the overweight.
When you study young people you see a definite link even between overweight and mortality as they get older - it's better to be skinnier when younger in other words. But it's normal to gain weight as you age, so when you study an older population and track them for a couple of decades you see that overweight correlates with longer life. The effect is typically more significant for men in the cohorts.
But does that mean that it's dangerous to be thin? Not really. it's likely the confounding variable that older people, before they die, usually experience some wasting. People who are rail thin at older ages (and not from exercise or fitness) are likely sick, cancer causes weight-loss etc.
Ultimately it's about primary versus secondary prevention and understanding individual risk. These studies are very much an old kind of epidemiologic science, where everything is averaged for a population. But we know, as individuals, we have different risks for different diseases. So, if heart disease or stroke is what kills your family members or diabetes is a major risk you may not want to rest easy with being overweight, as those are the likely threats to your health.
I still recall from anthropology the "Venus" statues of some so-called primitive tribes, how the image was of a heavily obese woman with large breasts. When asked about the image, the anthro prof told us that in some tribes, women were set aside to raise or help rais the young, and they were the milk mothers. The image was a fertility image, you see - a woman who was well fed could have many babies or care for many babies without dying suddenly.
Over time our images of what's a good weight and what's a bad weight change constantly. It depends on what the culture thinks is the most important part of life. In today's society we idolize sexuality and sensuality, thus idolize thin women and men with large muscles. In times past, the emphasis was on a large, healthy family, so a stockier woman and a strong but stocky man was the prefered image. The better to have and raise many children.
I think there's something to that in our scientific search for the perfect weight. We're busy trying to figure out what we're "supposed" to weigh because a lot of us are couch potatoes (Yes, I spell "potatoe" with an "e" damn it) and we're terribly over-weight. But I don't think we're gonna find the magic bullet any time soon until we look at what's going on inside our heads as well as our bodies. There has to be a reason for the ideal and the reality being so far from each other.
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