Overweight people have lower death rate
A US federal research study has concluded that overweight people have a lower death rate than people of "normal" weight:
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.Link (via Kottke)
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The BMI is sketchy at best, since having lots of muscle mass and almost no body fat can qualify you as overweight.
But in the end, it seems like a new medical study (almost always related to food) comes out every few months and is later debunked by a subsequent study, proving just how little we really know about health and nutrition.
Eating red meat, drinking too much and being over weight increases your chances or dying of cancer according to a new report:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/31/wcancer131.xml
You could of course say that very overweight people are at less risk of death because they're unable to move much or get into a car, therefore won't get run over!
Okay, I just read the article. It's a little confusing, but it all boils down to no one really knowing why overweight people live longer than normal weight people. The BMI index is helpful in determining how healthy you are, but other variables must be taken into account like muscle mass. However, if you 'listen' to your body you know whether you are of normal weight, overweight, or obese. There are several nasty habits that could be causing normal weight people to die sooner. They would be smoking, excessive drinking, and/or drug abuse. Those habits will kill you, for sure, no matter what your weight. Britney Spears seems to be content with her extra weight right now. Maybe that will add more years to her life? Just a thought.
It seems they haven't controlled for poverty -- at least I didn't find any note on this. Poor people who cannot afford to buy something to eat are probably a little bit slimmer than middle-class members. We also know that poorer people die earlier than their wealthier compatriots.
@4 Actually in the developed world the poor are overwhelmingly heavier than the middle class and rich. Poor people in the US can afford to by food, it is just cheap unhealthy food. Do you remember the tub of 105,000-calorie lard featured on Boing Boing last month?
The death rate is 100%, always has been, always will be. I cringe whenever i see "lowers death rate" in a headline.
The question that came to my mind after the first paragraph was 'how old are these people?' It doesn't seem possible that the CDC would ignore age, but there's no information in the article. For all we know, the two groups have different average ages or the distribution is different enough to give these results. Just saying the death rate was higher doesn't necessarily mean the people were dying younger, given a lifetime of varying diet and health care standards. Sadly, this is typical science reporting even for the nytimes. They make stories to grab attention and leave out enough details for anyone with critical thinking to decide if it is crap or not. I'm not saying this is crap, the CDC is almost certainly on the level, but of the stories the media picks up a too large part is undeniable crap.
The obvious quote from Woody Allen's Sleeper, which takes place 200 years in the future:
Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.
The other thing that's important to remember is that this is not experimental. Since you cannot randomly assign people to be either overweight or skinny, you also get a whole host of factors that those two groups could share that are not either weight or disease (health seeking habits, health care habits, etc). Isolating weight and disease is impossible.
This means that you can't say "overweight people have a lower death rate", you can only say "overweight people are ___ times more likely to have a lower death rate". I don't know what that rate is - it could end up being small.
It also seems to me that in older people, BMI would be a very inaccurate measurement as many older people who have chronic diseases are thinner. This would skew the results dramatically.
Lastly, it seems that the diseases overweight people get are ones that have long been associated with weight gain whereas the diseases that "normal" people get have a host of causes (genetics, chemical exposure, etc). If I had to pick, I'd rather stay at a healthy weight and take my chances on the unknown than gain weight and know I will have to live with Diabetes.
You also have to remember that when they say "overweight", they don't mean everyone who weighs more than they should. The "overweight" class is separated from the "obese" class and the "morbidly obese" class. And those standards vary over the years as researchers refine their definitions.
sophistry. williamsburg, death rate impies death rate per year.
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the article was wise to point out that living longer does not mean that you're healthier, especially in the american health care system set up to expensively extend lives of people sick, often because of diet.
the interesting study was not thorough enough in that they did not look at the variable of metabolism. low metabolism may up your lifespan. skinny keeps you healthier, but it's possible to be skinny with a big metabolism if you work out or something, which could lead to these results.
What they usually intend to say:
Lowers early death rate
Though, on the other hand, people don't like to deal with the fact that the death rate over time is 100%.
I'm a fat person with lots of fat relatives. Most of them lived longer than average. The main difference between who died young and who lived long was who got diabetes.
I'm curious about the "less likely to die of Alzheimer's" finding.
Does this mean that the "overweight" are less likely to have Alzheimer's, or does it mean that Alzheimer's just takes longer to kill them?
Because as bad as Alzheimer's is, living longer with it does not seem like an unambiguous good.
Amusing to watch some commenters struggle to justify continuing their fat-hating attitudes, grasping at any factor that might not have been taken into account (um, the thin people might have been smokers! Or meth heads! Or the fat people might have good metabolisms!) It can't be that the bmi is flawed, or that maybe a healthy weight is a bit higher than we thought--and a bit higher than a fashionable size.
An analysis I read of these findings the last time they were announced was that many fatal diseases (many kinds of cancer, Alzheimer's) tend to make the people loose a huge amount of weight before they die. As a result, people are more likely to die when they're thin than when they're fat.
My grandfather, for example, lost nearly a 100 pounds in the months before he died of throat cancer. I almost didn't recognize him, the last time I saw him. So he would have been "thin" when he died. But he'd been fat his whole life up until his fatal illness.
And don't call me a fat-hater for pointing this out - I've been fat for most of my life.
In short, these studies need deeper analysis and might not be a reson to eat another doughnut.
"The other thing that's important to remember is that this is not experimental. Since you cannot randomly assign people to be either overweight or skinny, you also get a whole host of factors that those two groups could share that are not either weight or disease (health seeking habits, health care habits, etc). Isolating weight and disease is impossible."
Which you could say of every epidemological study. Which is why we should generally ignore them unless they show very large changes in relative risk.
woohoo! finally a reason to eat more cheetos.
I've got to think this is being skewed by a lot of people who become skinny shortly before they die.
I know it's anecdotal, but I've known perhaps a dozen people over 90; every single one was skinny, and of those whose old photo albums I've perused, every one they always had been skinny.
Most of the overweight people at my grandparents old folks home were in wheelchairs because they had had their legs amputated, due to diabetes.
So if they just weighed them, I dont know how BMI would work for that, would it use their old height or would you have to measure their new height, from their stumps to the top of their head?
I think its interesting that even the extremely obese, while dying of other things, fit the trend of having a lesser chance of dying of lung cancer. I wonder whether there is a biochemical link between having body fat over a certain amount and the body being able to fight off certain forms of cancer (e.g lung).
Twoshort et al.: Wouldn't a significantly large number of people have to be undergoing rapid weight loss and dying for that to skew the numbers significantly? We're talking about on the order of 100,000 people per year. I find that rather unlikely. Especially considering the following quote (from near the end of the article):
"Researchers tried to rule out those who were thin, because they might have been already sick. They also ruled out smokers, and the results did not change."
Overweight people die younger from heart disease, diabetes, and a multitude of other illnesses. As the surviving overweight people grow older and start succombing to the normal wasting diseases everyone faces in old age, then their survivability rate goes higher. (If you have cancer and keep your weight on through chemotherapy, your odds are much better.)
Now, Cory's decision to put the word "normal" in quotes greatly disturbs me. Has BoingBoing jumped on the leftwing bandwagon yet again, for no reason other than it's the leftwing thing to do?
Obesity is a grave threat to our national security. Undermining efforts to fight this epidemic is nothing short of treasonous.
Epidemic is an odd word for it. For many of us, being fat is as normal as having brown hair.
I'm not sure that's a good comparison, Laurie. Genetics is the only factor in your natural hair color, whereas weight is influenced by genetics but ultimately determined by calories in versus calories out. Excess body fat can come easily but I'm not sure I'd say it's normal, or healthy.
One glaring problem with the "born fat" position is that millions of people don't suddenly acquire new genes. Unless we're talking, what? X-Men? Are we witnessing the next quantum leap in evolution?
Environment plays a major role, to be sure, but saying that you have a genetic predisposition to obesity is like saying you have a genetic predisposition to smoke crack. It's a negative behavior--you should overcome your disposition to avoid negative outcomes. And...here's the real disconnect: If people can't help themselves, the government has a responsibility to do something about it.
If we want to remain competitive in the world--if we want to survive as a sovereign nation--the U.S. government has to take radical measures to reverse this trend. We can't refurbish our military vehicles the way Disney refurbished the Small World boats. Corporate America especially has to wake up to the fact that we're destroying our most important resource.
I think body size is one of those collision of nature/nurture kind of things. To imply genetics has no impact on body size is ludicrous.
But, certainly, what you eat and how active you are can trump genetics.
I'll give you some examples on how genetics impacts what you eat. I don't like most vegetables. They taste pretty bad to me. Most leafy vegetables taste like tin. Many fruits taste bad to me. Ditto many kinds of fish and shellfish. If I enjoyed eating vegetables, fruits and fish as much as I like meats and starches, I'd probably weigh less. I have a natural tendency to eat very quickly. I've been trying for years to slow down, because most studies about eating say when you eat quickly, it takes you longer to feel full. Haven't had much luck yet.
On the flip side, I weigh about 40 pounds less now that I did about 10 years ago. Most women my age age gaining weight and I'm loosing it very slowly. So, I am learning. I am more active than I was, and I'm more careful about the foods and amounts of food I eat. I do understand about the issues of weight and health (I've already been on Lipitor for nearly 2 years). But being overweight isn't quite the same thing as being sick. For many people, obesity has little impact on their health. People need to be more rational about issues of weight.
When people, especially women, develop an anathema about being overweight, they can develop bulimia and/or anorexia. And if you think fat people's health problems are costly, so are bulimics'.
Smokers tend to be thinner than average, and I think that may have something to do with it.
What other unhealthy things keep people thin? (...and don't say 'gym')
Laurie,
That was a thoughtful post, so I don't want to go condescending on you. (This is not meant as "ironic" condescension by telling you I'm not going to be condescending.) This is just a few comments.
About vegetables tasting tinny. Taste buds may be inherited from your mother based upon what she ate during pregnancy, and can be conditioned by childhood eating habits. What I haven't read in the research is whether other foods just taste better or vegetables actually taste like poison. It's also true that tastebuds can be conditioned in adulthood, but it's not clear whether foods that taste like poison will ever taste good. What I would recommend is trying as many cooking methods as you can, because you should be eating vegetables; if not for your own health, for the health of your children, because you're going to perpetuate a cycle if you don't.
About bulimia/anorexia. I don't think this is what you're doing, but, like the genetics argument, this is something pro-fat advocates bring up all the time, using it as an intellectually dishonest argument. The conclusion is supposed to be that bulimia/anorexia is much more dangerous, so we should stop telling people to lose weight.
The fact is, bulimia/anorexia only affects 1-4% of women, whereas over 50% of American women are overweight. Males with bulimia/anorexia are statistically insignificant.
Because anorexic woman look frightening, and because the harsh lights used by paparazzi create deep shadows on celebrity women's thin bodies, they make great sensationalist magazine covers. Because no media personalities are out there campaigning for acceptance of the underweight (whereas pro-fat advocates include Gina Kolata of the NYT and several high-profile book authors), and ultimately because celebrity women are seen to have caused their own problem, whereas obese women are victims of genetics and/or society, the media shows no restraint in brutalizing thin women on the magazine covers and gossip programs. (If People Magazine ran a cover ridiculing Tyra Banks for getting fat, people would perceive it as meanness and think only about how Tyra's feelings must be hurt.) The sense I get from these magazine covers is that pro-fat America is gloating about how the mighty have fallen.
I see pro-fat advocates decrying the fact that 38% (or some other number) of women wish they weighed less. What they seem to forget is that over 50% of American women weigh too much. Medically. Objectively, they weigh too much. Of course they should want to weigh less, and we should be encouraging them!
So, comparing obesity to bulimia/anorexia is not an apples-apples comparison. It's more like comparing a barrel of apples to five oranges.
Anorexic 20 year olds are more likely to drop dead than fat 20 year olds. Granted, there are many more fat folks than anorexics. Merely being fat doesn't tend to cause sudden death until someone in their 40s and up.
When I compare my health problems to my younger sister's (a bulimic for nearly 30 years), I'm in "perfect health."
Anorexia is not the alternative to obesity. That's a lie you tell yourself to justify bad habits and bad attitudes.