Great News! Being Fat Isn’t So Bad After All!
There’s a Tech Central Station column up about how the numbers correllating obesity and early death have been very badly overstated.
But in a study released this week by the CDC and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (”Excess Deaths Associated with Underweight, Overweight, and Obesity”), the public health community has finally owned up to their massive fib by acknowledging that the number of deaths due to obesity in the US is closer to 26,000 not 400,000 as previously reported. This means that if these numbers are correct — which is questionable — then obesity goes from being the leading or second leading cause of death to perhaps the seventh leading source of premature mortality.
Apart from this huge downward revision in the numbers of people supposedly dying from fat, there are several things in this study which signal the end of any legitimate linkage between obesity and premature death. First, for the merely overweight with BMI’s from 25-30 there is no excess mortality. In fact, being overweight was “associated with a slight reduction in mortality relative to the normal weight category.” Being overweight not only does not lead to premature death, something that dozens of other studies from around the world have been saying for the last 30 years, but it also carries less risk from premature death than being “normal” weight. In other words the overweight=early death “fact” proclaimed by the public health community is simply not true.
Of course, being fat has other disadvantages, but they’re mostly social, not health related.
Now, what motivation might the public health community have for lying about how bad fat i$ for you? I’m $ure they had the pure$t of intention$.
See, you’re better off just following my philosophy, which is captured in this little comic strip:
April 26th, 2005 at 4:09 pm
Many years back, there was a different MBI system that the military toyed with;
1. multiply your height (in inches) by your width across the shoulders (also in inches)
2. divide by 7
3. that answer, plus or minus 10% should be your weight. The results are somewhat more humane.
April 26th, 2005 at 4:11 pm
The above should be “BMI” not “MBI.” Sorry.
April 26th, 2005 at 9:01 pm
Hmm. I’ve always considered the BMI to be kind of ridiculous in principle. You can’t have a healthy, short, muscular person?