“A widely quoted federal study that concluded obesity is poised to overtake tobacco as the leading cause of preventable death inflated the impact of obesity on the annual death toll by tens of thousands due to statistical errors.”
I don’t think anyone’s claiming that being morbidly obese is healthy…however, I’m sure it doesn’t quite deserve the hysteria that has surrounded it since the Atkin’s diet craze took off.
Also I think at some point as part of growing up (or old, maybe?) we all have to start to accept ourselves and our bodies as we really are, not as we (or others) might wish them to be.
Not a matter of stepping on toes, but as you say, it is a serious issue - life or death in many cases, and as such one should quote and link to specific studies, rather than employing one’s own interpretation, unless one is a qualified medical professional. And in the case of the latter, it would still be out of bounds as medical advice I suspect.
But you have a tendency to apologize rather than discuss, James. Instead of responding to my post above about the health problems associated with obesity, you apologized and ignored the post itself. You will admit there are serious health problems associated with obesity?
There are serious health issues associated with obesity.
There is also a strong association between laying down and dying, and yet we can lay down and not die.
It is the nature of the relationship between the health issues and the obesity which is at the heart of the controversy, and how that relationship may best be addressed.
As for my tendancy to apologize if I believe I have upset someone, that is merely a part of the culture in which I was raised and in which I live.
Let’s not let this one go into la-la land, ok folks?
Being too fat=health risks
being too thin=health risks
being alive=health risks
solution=Fugghedaboutit!
Wanderer, that article was interesting and I may at least be able to follow up on the story from there. However, the website that wrote the story describes itself this way:
In my opinion, this group’s analysis of the CDC study would not be an analysis I could rely on, because they obviously are coming from a certain point of view----“defending enjoyment”. Their analysis may be correct, but because of their stated purpose, I cannot accept that article as evidence that the dangers of obesity are over-rated. I realize you may have just been intending the article to be a sampling of what the argument was about, not an authoritative article.
In what’s probably an ill-fated attempt to draw this back on topic and away from the precipitous brink of being locked, I have a question.
What do you think should be done to rehabilitate the ultra-skinny model subculture? After all, if something isn’t done, then all of those soon-to-be out of work models will lose another pound due to not having any marketable skills and will be caught up by the next stiff wind and swept out to sea, or up into trees or worse… They could get caught in an updraft and be lifted thousands of feet up in the air, where they would pose a threat to commercial aircraft. I guess that if it gets bad enough, someone could develop a super-sized flypaper type thing and catch them as they blew by. Yeah, that’s the ticket. I wonder if Ronco has thought of this. Maybe I should call them to see if they’d like to buy the idea.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the supermodels. If they are truly good looking they will be either supported for the rest of their lives by sugar daddies, or married to either a film star or sports star, and supported for the rest of their lives. Some of them even have brains and go into business. But a good looking woman never has to worry about being alone. This is something I know about.
I don’t rely on their analysis…I merely pointed to the quoted section as an article typical of the kind that ran when the CDC backpedaled on their study. The CDC did actually make the admission that they had problems with their study. I would have pointed to the WSJ article mentioned, but it required registration, and I didn’t want to spend more than 5 minutes dragging up a “typical article”.
But yeah, I agree, any analysis done by a group with an agenda should be taken with a grain of salt.
In the 90’s, when “heroin chic” was even stronger than it is now, I remember this commercial..these waif-like androgynous actors were speaking in a tone of bored desperation saying things like “I feel a yearning…an emptiness inside”, when suddenly a guy pops up and goes “Eat something!” I think it was a jack-n-the-box commercial. It cracked me up royal.
This is a news article, the findings are reported widely.
Consumer groups were seriously critical of the design
of the studies for a long while before the CDC themselves
acknowledged serious statistical errors.
Apparently the standard estimate of mortality due to
obesity was 14 times higher than the corrected result,
which has dropped from 365,000 to 25, 814.
Also it is now controversial whether, in the initial studies linking obesity
to heart disease, diabetes, and so on, obesity was a cause or
an artifact of the real cause, e.g. lack of exercise,
eating the wrong stuff.
The question is whether obese people who live an otherwise
healthy life style are at risk and how much.
Also overweight, but not obese, people seem to have lower
mortality rates than people at ideal weight.
This is all extraordinarily controversial right now, lots
of critics and defenders. Sometimes one has to take
another look.
“At this time, a BMI of less than 18.5 percent is defined as underweight. From 18.5 percent to 24.9 percent is considered normal, while a BMI of 30 percent or greater is considered obese.”
Oh man, those numbers are downright funny. Anyone here ever had their body mass accurately calculated? How on earth can one come up with a underweight, overweight and normal BMI numbers, without taking into account percentage of lean body mass vs non-lean body mass (fat)???
Sadly, I, many well more than average healthy people, and the vast majority of professional athletes (Sumo wrestlers, and NFL lineman not withstanding), are grossly underweight. Poor Roger Federer, he may not live to spend all his U.S. Open winnings, unhealthy chap.
I’ve never had “normal” weight…when I went into the navy, I had 3% body fat and a 26 inch waist…but I weighed nearly 200 lbs. When I had strep throat and went to the doc, the LT on duty took my stats..when we got to the scale, he looked at me, looked at the scale, looked back at me, and said only one word..“Where?”.
for the majority of my life, I was (as far as any chart was concerned) underweight. I was also perfectly healthy. My dad was small, my mom is small, and while my kids have gotten a lot taller than anyone else in the family, they are still skinny (Nate actually didn’t weigh ENOUGH to pass his Navy physical, but they went ahead and accepted him because he had 6 months before actually going to basic).
My metabolism basically stopped when I hit age 40. I feel like I’m overweight, although I’m now “normal” on all the charts.
I have a huge history of Type 2 diabetes in my family, including being gestational diabetic myself during both pregnancies. And all of my relatives were what you would term “skinny”.
What I’m basically saying is all those “charts” don’t mean a thing unless you also look at health history, family history, body type, bone mass, etc.
