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Wednesday, April 20, 2005

I could have told them this
Posted by Jill | 6:56 AM

The Bergen Record recently ran an op-ed piece by Paul Campos, author of The Obesity Myth, about the media's appalling lack of attention to Terri Schiavo's eating disorder, instead referring to the pre-bulimia Schiavo as "grotesquely obese". I was so impressed by this piece that I e-mailed Campos, telling him of my own history as an overweight but preposterously healthy person, and received a reply containing the following: "According to the government, people like you don't exist."

Well, in the middle of all the weight hysteria being belched out of government agencies and the medical profession comes a study indicating that not only do people like me exist, but we may have a LOWER death rate than our skinny compatriots:

People who are overweight but not obese have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight, federal researchers are reporting today.

The researchers - statisticians and epidemiologists from the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - also found that increased risk of death from obesity was seen for the most part in the extremely obese, a group constituting only 8 percent of Americans.

And being very thin, even though the thinness was longstanding and unlikely to stem from disease, caused a slight increase in the risk of death, the researchers said.

The new study, considered by many independent scientists to be the most rigorous yet on the effects of weight, controlled for factors like smoking, age, race and alcohol consumption in a sophisticated analysis derived from a well-known method that has been used to predict cancer risk.

It also used the federal government's own weight categories, which define fatness and thinness according to a "body mass index" correlating weight to height, regardless of sex. For example, 5-foot-8 people weighing less than 122 pounds are underweight. If they weighed 122 to 164 pounds, their weight would be normal. They would be overweight at 165 to 196, obese at 197 to 229, and extremely obese at 230 or over.


Now, I think the body mass index is a lot of crap, since it posits an arbitrary BMI of 22 as healthy for everyone, and doesn't distinguish between the sexes. One doesn't have to be a scientist to know that women tend to store fat more than men do and build muscle more slowly; it's related to estrogen and biology. But science is determined these days to find no differences between men and women. This may be understandable, because whenever very real differences between groups are talked about, we also have a tendency to rank them by worth, and the traits and strengths of white males tend always to be assigned higher worth values, but it's still ridiculous.

What's still a mystery is why so many scientists refuse to believe that moderate "overweight" may be less of a health risk than they think.
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