Slashdot Mirror
French Scientists Link Higher BMI with Lower IQ
Xemu writes "French scientists have linked obesity to lower IQ reports the Telegraph. In a new five-year study of more than 2,200 adults, people with a low body mass index (BMI) could recall 30% more words in a vocabulary test than those who were obese. The fatter subjects also showed a higher rate of cognitive decline when they were retested five years later. In the United States, 30% of the population is obese according to OECD. That's the highest rate of obesity anywhere. Do these high obesity rates affect the average IQ of the population?" (Of course, this sidesteps discussion of whether IQ tests measure anything significant at all.)
... given that most Slashdotters are tremendous lardasses?
My IQ is only 100 but I am a lot smarter than most people for my 'low' IQ. Yes I have a weight problem but I don't blame it on IQ, I blame it on american diet and adverting on TV and in magazines.
When expecting to find intelligence in a person, do not look at their age but instead look at their IQ and maturity firs
The Body Mass Index is not accurate. It is basically mass vs height, and makes no distinction between fat and muscle, both of which increase mass measurements.
During the rainy season, I don't exersize, so I lose muscle mass and get skinny, and I look - pardon me for saying it - like a geek. And my BMI is normal ( and allegedly healthy ). But during the other ten months, I am more muscular ( and probably a lot healthier ) and yet I am technically obese, according to the BMI.
Do I feel smarter? Heck, I'm a slashdotter - I think I'm smart all the time.
(Of course, this sidesteps discussion of whether IQ tests measure anything significant at all.)
This also seems to sidestep discussion of whether BMI measures anything significant at all.
=Smidge=
This has frightening implications for the majority of us /.'ers
I'm not fat, just big boned...
Yet another reason to hate the French.
Reminds me of the classic:
"Noting that ball-point pens rely on gravity in order to function, the USA spent over 12 million dollars on developing a range of Nitrogen-pressurized ball-point pens which would work in a zero gravity enviroment. The Russians on the other-hand just spent 50 cents on a box of pencils"
I knew there was something behind all those "dumb American" jokes.
Please reply with your best ones!
This wasn't a general purpose IQ test. It was a specific test of people's ability to recall words. They're talking about memory in particular, not some fuzzy idea of general intelligence.
Indeed, Timothy does oversimplify the matter.
It is slightly beside the point though because the study noticed a drop in 'cognitive function' in obese people, not IQ. Cognitive function most certainly is significant, albeit specifically to the function measured (which in this case was primarily arthmimetic and vocabulary). It was only the reporting newspaper which introduced IQ, probably for the benefit of dumber/fatter readers.
Not the study, but rather the first linked article.
First, they make the classic error of attributing causation when the study found correlation. If that was in the original study, then I'd question the researcher's methodology, but I suspect the blame lies with whoever wrote the article. Testing people's intelligence and comparing their weight does not show a causitive link between wieght and intellect. It could just as easily show that poor judgement translates into bad eating habits and low IQ.
Second, the criticism they reported came from a politician who tried to use anecdotal evidence to debunk the link. That's right, she said she knew witless skinny people and clever fat people, so the study must therefor be wrong. Someone ought to tell her that the plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence".
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
I can speak for certain that I am not as dumber as other people.
Seriously, though, I test pretty well for intelligence, but being fat is part of a vicious cycle with laziness and depression, leading to a lack of achievement. I wonder, in fact, if the results would be similar in the population of people with untreated major depression regardless of BMI. Based on no scientific data at all, I would suspect increased BMI as being a symptom of another problem which could be the causative factor in the poor IQ showing.
Can we draw any real conclusions without knowing their testing methodology, etc etc etc. How'd they normalize their data?
This last bit from the TFA sums up how I feel about it:
"But Ann Widdecombe, the former Tory minister, said that the research seemed unsustainable. "You just need to look around the world and you will see hundreds of thin nitwits and clever fat people,""
It is worth pointing out that good looks & a tall height can be as relevant to your success in life as your weight.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I would imagine that the relationship is the other way around: dumber people get fat more often than smart people.
IQ testing issues aside, the summary suggests results for memory recall... not IQ.
IANAOR (I am not an obesity researcher), but it seems to be that this does not indicate lower IQ, but rather a lower energy level. I think it is a rather uncontroversial statement that those suffering from obesity have a much lower level of energy. I have experienced it myself during extended periods (several weeks or more) of not having regular exercise: You become lethargic, tired, and find it difficult to concentrate on things. I would imagine that this is a good indication of why those suffering obesity would score poorer on an IQ test.
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
In most industrialized countries and especially in the US, obesity is strongly correlated with low income. Since there is also a strong link between low income and low IQ scores, there may be no causal relationship at all between obesity and a lowered IQ.
beyond the issues that have been raised already (like BMI not being necessarly representative, IQ tests not being particularly good, etc), there's the following problem: Is the fact that you're fat makes you brain go to hell, OR, is it that idiots are more likely to not realise that there's 200-300 calories in a can of soda.
My vote is on the later. Because honestly, I don't see anything about body fat that could affect your head (to -this- extent). So its almost certain that its people who don't have a memory good enough to remember their grade school biology lessons about how there's fat in other things than steak.
If we assume IQ tests are valid measures of intelligence, this actually kind of makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Humans have always survived because of our relatively high intelligence by comparison to everything else in the world. A person who clearly has access to sufficient food is going to naturally necessitate less intelligence to survive than someone who has to struggle to meet every meal. Although the circumstances of the modern world have changed, such behavior could easily stick around. If your body 'thinks' you're in need of food, it might change its chemestry to stimulate more thought.
Of course, this is all very hypothetical, I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever to back it up. And it still falls on that assumption that it's okay to assume IQ tests measure something relevant. And when you assume anything, that's exactly what you do: make an ASS out of U and ME.
How much do you want to bet that the words weren't types of food?
That can't be true. Modern medical advances, as well and sanitation, have raised the average life expectancy in the U.S. considerably over the past hundred years. So, an average certainly can be raised or lowered, but it still doesn't change the fact that half the population lies on either side of it (well, that's really the median, but I'm not going to be that picky.)
that jocks are just plain dumb and nerds are intelligent.
Since you bring it up, it might be worth mentioning that 7 out of 10 americans didn't vote for him.
wow, you must be fat!!
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
I think people think differently. And thus assuming that the way you think is correct, is incorrect.
The Question should be: does low IQ increase BMI? (Are Dumb people fatter?)
I know of no comprehensive definition of intelligence that is agreed upon by a majority of scientists, but if you have evidence to the contrary feel free to provide it. Obviously, there isn't going to be any scientific definition of "success in the real world".
The French are calling us fat, lazy, and now stupid. Great, well at least we aren't a bunch cheese eating surrender monkeys. Time to eat some more pork rinds and watch American Idol. I hope I don't have to get out of my chair to find my remote. Found it. It was under a fold of fat. I also found my car keys.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
It's set with 100 being the average IN SOME PARTICULAR YEAR.
Yuck, if you want to compare somebody against the average. It's nice though if you want to see how the population is changing.
30% of people in the US are obese, are the other 70% foreigners?
I'm never hiring a fat person again. They have no self disipline.
This is no fat-bashing. Seriously, our most important asset in life is our body, and they don't even care about maintaining that asset(!). How can I then trust any important workrelated issue/decision with them?
Maybe the opposite way: low IQ (or you are loosing it for other reason) implies you get higher BMI (mean values). For example: you loose IQ you view more TV -> you gain BMI I don't understand way the researchers are so convinced in BMI -> IQ
There are probably other factors involved here. For example, poverty has also been linked to obesity (in America.) And less intelligence can also be linked to poverty.
So does obesity somehow lead to mental decline? Or are people who are less intelligent more likely to let their physical health deteriorate?
Or maybe less intelligence leads to poverty which leads to obesity. Then again, it could be the other way around...
Correlation does not equal causation. If I had to place a bet, I would say that the link between obesity and intelligence isn't biological like the article is inferring. There may be some kind of link there, but I bet that other factors are more influential.
This is probably mistaking causality.
Being overweight doesn't make you stupid,
being stupid means you have higher chance of getting over weight because you don't monitor diet/understand proper eating.
Now I hate to be apparently the first to bring this up, but in general poor people are fatter, true? I am aware that in America, this phenomenum has been diminishing in the last 20 years or so, and rich the rich have been closing the "fat gap", but is that the case in France? It wouldn't be that much of a stretch in my mind to believe that poor people have lower IQs. I wonder if you tested fat and thin people from the same socio-economic background if the results of this study would have been as striking.
Of course I didn't actually RTFA so maybe they already did that..
are all Mr. Universe competitors? What?!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Disregarding the discussions of the relevance of IQ tests and the relevance of BMI, I feel inclined to think that the majority of those tested, who decreased the test score for the high BMI segment in the study, are neither physically active, nor intellectually active. Is it not true that the brain needs "maintenance" in the form of challanges and problem solving to maintain performance? If my theory is in any way conected to reality, it is more a question of life-style, rather than fat eating brain cells.
There are decades of data to prove the corellation between IQ and actual, demonstrated intelligence and success in the real world. Maybe you would like to clarify yourself, Timothy?
The disproportionately high representation in groups like MENSA of lonely singles who earn below average salaries in unsatisfying jobs seems to counter your "decades of data" (which I have never seen.)
Or are you defining "demonstrated intelligence" as the ability to recite Star Trek dialog by rote and "success in the real world" as having your very own crafts store at the local Renaissance Festival?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
...is that people buy it:
p
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.as
rj
Bush was elected TWICE (or allowed to take office twice, anyway)... what do YOU think?
.....
:P
What do I think?
I think you are probably fat.
This just goes to show you can 'prove' anything with 'results'. No matter how tainted they are or how much of an agenda you have.
My theorem, with the same numbers, is that people with lower IQ on average eat more and exercise less. Thus the results prove my theory.
Its all a scam these days, including so called 'science'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
IQ is defined such that the mean is exactly 100 and the standard deviation from the mean is exactly 15.
Therefore by definition the average IQ cannot change. If everyone suddenly got a lot smarter, the average IQ would be the same as it is now: exactly 100.
But alas! When IQ was dreamt up, the average among a population of test scores was defined as an IQ of 100.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life.
Did you mean: relationship ?
Those experiments are not the first of the kind, and not the best explained for sure. In different ones link between obesity (it was percentage of fat not BMI) was also linked with IQ. Difference was that somebody who conducted experiments thought for a while over results (apparently that person wasn't fat - pun intetended). And result was:
Fat people need more oxygen that goes to fat tissues, so less goes to brain. Second: less blood with nutritions goes directly there.
They published also some proper tables with sugar and oxygen levels to prove their point. Other thing is total lack of excercise - that effectively slows down your heart, kidneys, liver, and so on. Not to mention that processing food in stomach requires a lot of energy. You know that feeling after eating a lot of food, especially fatty.
That explains why best geeks are good at what they do plus they have a dozen of intresting hobbies and not so uncommonly train some martials arts or something similar.
So go to the gym, NOW!
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
If they were smart, they'd take better care of themselves.
You can't take the sky from me...
Well, obviously. Overweight people can't wield number 2 pencils and fill in those damn circles like the skinny, healthy kids.
It's discrimination! Overweight people should get more time on IQ tests.
You are obviously not familiar with this politician! She is both short and not most peoples idea of a pin up girl.
I do believe that she is fairly clever though.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Obesity leads to poor health which leads to diffuculty in concentration, stress, lower attention span etc. Also obese people are (statistically) less educated, with lower self-esteem etc. All of which correlate very well with the findings of this study. In otherwords obesity correlates well with doing badly in tests (IQ or any) for various reasons - it does not lower your IQ.
Any qualified sociologist could've made a fairly accurate hypothesis for the results of that study. But that's boring so people will want to see something in it ...
Oh well..
Dr. Doh! (NIMNO)
National reseach Institute for the Mind Numblingly Obvious
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
You're right, IQ is incredibly meaningless. A well-socialized individual with a good work ethic, who is willing to parlay whatever gray matter they have into the task at hand will always prove successful at life. Many of the under-20 uber-nerds who cling to their IQ scores as proof positive of their superiority over others haven't figured this out yet, and to their credit, it's something that's only realized with time: Intelligence is both nature and nurture--the daughter of a doctor and lawyer becomes a bum if she has no direction or commitment. The daughter of a field hand and a grocer becomes the world's most well-respected biologist if she has direction and commitment.
-------------
Funny story: The guy downstairs had his "MENSA Bulletin" delivered to my mailbox by mistake (probably due to the innerwebs and lack of blue mailboxes!), so of course I kept it. I've been leaving it prominently near the john for some high brow bathroom reading. And man oh man, have I been disappointed. The articles are poorly conceived and written, the letters from readers absolutely dumb. The pictures of "smart people" show them not even badly dressed, but incapably dressed--as in , for example, they clearly missed belt loops when they were putting on their belts (Is looking accidentally slovenly for nationally distributed photographs the mark of a genuinely intelligent person who likes themselves? I submit that it is not.)
So my friends have been coming over, and when they inevitably have to use the restroom, they see the magazine and go "You're in MENSA?" all accusingly. And of course I pretend to be, and mutter something about how "we're trying to reform the government under our own intelligent rule" (did you see that episode of The Simpsons too?)
And as I can feel their opinion of me lessening, lessening...I finally let on that, no, of course I'm not a part of fucking MENSA. And every time, they respond with something like "Oh I was gonna say, because those people are idiots!" And then we page through the magazine together, mocking it the entire time. And we live happily ever after. The end.
people with a low body mass index (BMI) could recall 30% more words in a vocabulary test than those who were obese
Then perhaps people get fat because they can't remember they have already eaten.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Not so long ago, it was black people that scientists could "prove" had lower intelligence. Now that we can't use that one anymore, thank god we've found a new target for society to discriminate against!
which means that the obese are less often criminals.
(Which is more than can be said about those French scientists.)
It's not appropriate to discriminate according to skin color, so let's discriminate according to digestion / lifestyle.
Guess who really is the dumb fuck...
thanks for sharing.
NOTE: I remember reading an article that concluded that "the stupider you are, the more smart do you think that you are". This makes perfect sense, in a darwinstic way.
If you are stupid, and have a low self esteem, no way in hell you'll find a girl that likes you (and your genes are not passed on). If you have much self esteem then maybe you will find a girl that likes you because of your self esteem. Further, smart people will have so many diffrent qualities that they actually do not need high self esteem. Some girl will appreciate one of that qualities (and your genes are passed on).
The more stupid you are, the more self esteem you need in order to find a mate.
If you're not the sharpest knife in the drawer, you're probably not eating right and exercising. Once again, Science proves out that which Common Sense[tm] cannot!
;-)
Signed,
A thin person who is mocking you
In the original report, the scientists insists that it is NOT linked with intelligence. They say that only implies memory and they believe it's because obese people are more prone to vascular accident and that micro vascular accident in the brain could be responsible of loss of memmory...
This is just the same research that was proposed to prevent black people from enrolling as aviators in WWII. They've just replaced one hated minority with another. If this research was being conducted in California they'd be finding the correlation between smokers and low IQ.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Dieted, improved their "BMI", got smarter, and voted against the heathen horde and their vacuous "ideals"...
...'cause it's for dang sure we'd be in a REAL mess with either gore or lurch running the show.
The chance of having sleep apnea due to obsesity is very high. And it can have a very significant impact on cognitive abilities.
This test shows what we already suspected. That obesisty is bad for your health, and sometimes things that are bad for your health are bad for your brain.
IQ tests are okay to use on large sample sizes, as a statistical tool. but not very useful for indicating an individuals intelligence. Although it can indicate if an individual is abnormally low. There are a lot of issues with IQ tests when applied to specific demographics though.
poor people tend to have more problems with obesisty than rich people, and poor people tend to have less education and rich people tend to do better on IQ tests. So there is all sorts of crazy statistical weighting that must be done to make sense out of any numbers they get from this.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I didn't RTFA, But I did go to the mall yesterday... I can tell you I saw alot more than 30%
This makes me question their other data as well.
That doesn't necessarily mean that 7 out of 10 Americans voted for his opponent.
In fairness, the French will look for any opportunity to make fun of the British, including but not limited to calling them fat, stupid, or implying that their mothers were hamsters and their fathers smelt of elderberries.
May the Maths Be with you!
(Of course, this sidesteps discussion of whether IQ tests measure anything significant at all.)
Well, finding the black and white pattern that best finishes the picture might not seem relevant to one's functioning, but it's correlated with things like solving problems and getting money. I don't understand the hate for these instruments - they're useful for prediction, they passed both the test of capitalism and of science. Not one of them measures the worth of a person and not one of them measures cognitive capabilities perfectly (and also what they measure might be "insignificant" to you), but you can't deny the real benefits that many derive from them.
It's a French study. Is it on surrendering?
Judging by the content it sure sounds like an American study to me.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Check out BMIscale.com for more info, but here is a list of some people that might surprise you. Also, since there is no seperation between male and female, almost any athletic male would be considered overweight.
Here are some "fat" people:
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
at least, that would explain all the dumber-than-a-sack-of-hammers hollywood types who have PLENTY of self-esteem (in fact, they esteem themselves TOO highly...) but are actually too stupid to come in out of the rain (or dodge an "ugly stick" -- sean penn, are you out there?) and in spite of it all end up with the most beautiful starlets (who themselves are nothing to write home about, nor could they figure out how to write home if the notion came to them, yet also esteem themselves far beyond their own actual worth...)
Yup, I think you might just be on to something there.
Specifically, IQ measures how slim you are!
Wikileaks, no DNS
And your point is?
It also depends how you define success.
To be honest, although most MBAs might be successful at gaining money, they are often not particularly successful in terms of being contented. There's not much point in being rich if the result is stress and unhappiness.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
That's no way to go through life, son.
And this translates into them being stupid?
And the scientists have respect, why exactly? Because they can make pretty lights flash on and off a lot?
This isn't news; it's flamebait pablum.
This is simply not true. If you actually take an IQ test, you will see that it does not test your memory as had been done in the study, but rather your cognitive thinking skills. In fact, there are many people who can memorize history or math equations or whatever, but they come up far short when they have to apply the concepts they memorized.
Again, memorization is not critical thinking, and memorization != IQ.
BMI is a very. very poor way to measure someone's body fat. It ignores someone's muscle content.
It would be like saying big muscled body builders who do nothing more than lift weights all the time are stupid just because they have a higher BMI due to their muscle mass.
Just because two things always happen together doesn't mean that one of them caused the other. There could be a third factor that causes both. In this case, it seems that a sedentary lifestyle might cause both fatness and loss of thinking ability. Of course, they didn't test for that.
My favorite spurious correlation story concerns the hardness of pavement and baby deaths. If you study how hard the pavement is in different areas, you always find more baby deaths where the pavement is soft. The real correlation is that high temperatures cause soft pavement and baby deaths. http://www.burns.com/wcbspurcorl.htm
Puts a nifty, truthy spin on the old standby "big fat idiot"
Another thing the french came up with to justify bashing americans.
But, they also know that most will believe that and will try losing weight to try getting smarter.
Talk about killing two birds with one stone.
i thought i used to be smarter, this just proves it.
Fat, Dumb, and Happy. Does it get any better than that? Skinny, smart, and depressed isn't so hot.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
HAHA stupid fatasses.
Sorry... I'm a jaded skinny guy.
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
I think their little "test" failed to consider that people with larger BMI have Balanced Multiple Inputs, and their brains are more "distributed". It is a FACT that distributed nodes have slightly longer data pathways in fuller people than in smaller people.
Their test is quite inflammable and uncindiary.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
A study has revealed correlation between low school grades during childhood and increased alcohol consumption later. A special open letter to teachers has been published, demanding to give higher grades to kids to help them fight the alcohol problem later in life.
(a sex ed program for teens was cancelled 6 months after it started, because no drop in number of underaged mothers was noticed during that period...)
Sure this test is about remembering words. If you are retarded, you have difficulty remembering words. If you're stupid, you eat junk food and don't understand what is good for your body.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I think you'll find it's actually different research. With, you know, different researchers asking different questions in different countries. Unless of course you imagine some mystical connection between all research into anything that affects any members of a group that anyone dislikes.
You can't invalidate findings by imputing far-fetched motives to the researchers. You challenge the interpretation, the methodology, or the analysis. Or you repeat the study (with better methodology, perhaps) and get different results.
There is a valid point to be made about the uses to which research (or an oversimplified summary of research) can be put, by people with power. But that's another issue.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
That explains how the republicans got in office, the gravy laden states.
...invented relativity, Elle McPherson is known for her grand unified field theory, and the Olsen twins are known for their work on the human genome
What a complete and utter crock of horse shit. The correlation is meaningless. We all know some of the greatest minds were so focused on what they did that they were porkers. I know plenty of overweight people who it wouldn't pay to underestimate in the mental stakes. This is just just more ammo for the type of idiot that thinks there's nothing more to weight than being glutonous. Never mind different rates of metabolism, hunger working differently in different people and different lifestyles which though sometimes chosen aren't easily changed. No all that's too hard when you can have an attitude like "See I told you, let's pick on the fat kid cause he's stupid".
Merde.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Mensa is full of the haughty smart people who like to do inane mind-bending puzzles and brag about their high IQ. They piss off almost everybody else on the planet, including the managers that could promote them.
6'3" with 220 pounds of muscle is alot different than 220 pounds of fat.
shape mean you were overall more healthy? That would seem to follow with better mental agility and retention. Better blood flow to the brain would seem like an obvious reason for better thinking.
You mad
to someone speaking dutch. (for the non-dutch, 'slim' means smart in dutch)
the people that are obese will much more often than not have a high BMI (or low, whatever it is) so that doesn't mean there isn't something to fat people having lower IQ's. My guess is that since obesity is linked to lethargy, that there would also be a link to IQ because if you are tired then you won't test very well. They probably link it to BMI because height/weight are much easier stats to accumulate than measuring everyone's actual fat content. You may see the phenomenon even more pronounced when you take a more accurate measure of fatness.
For starters, let me disabuse you of the notion that I spend my evenings looking through the dirt-stained glass of an abandoned feed factory, breath frosting up the glass, spying on the secret meetings of the local MENSA chapter and hoping against hope that this week--oh god let it be this week--will be my chance to finally get admitted.
I actually have received invitations to attend MENSA meetings in the past, but have always declined. (Is that how recruitment is done? God only knows.) I politely say that I have a "differing philosophy". Namely, I believe that intelligence and success should be measured in terms of real, humanistic achievement in the real world, and not by corny metrics that determine whether or not a person should be admitted to a shamelessly self-promotional smarty-pants club. But of course I don't say all that. Politely declining the invitation is really enough.
I know that must just fry you--that there are people out there in the world who are at least reasonably smart and reasonably socialized, and who look at their introverted and prideful intelligent brothers with pity. It may seem at odds with what I read as teenage angst, but I assure you we exist.
And speaking of teenage angst, you might want to stop using the lexicon of a teenager. "Jocks"..."frat guys"...it's the language of someone who still thinks of people in terms of symbolic high school lunch tables (i.e. somebody not all that smart after all). If you're just some silly immature kid (I understand that about half of Slashdot readers fit that description)--then you get a free pass, because that's all you've seen so far in terms of how people organize themselves. But if not, then, well, there's that whole pity thing again. To phrase this in terms you've voluntarily adopted, I am no jock, or frat-guy, or anything else. I sit at everyone's lunch table, and I don't use their interests as some kind of bogus reason to judge and dismiss them.
So I guess to be more crass about things, that, my boy, is why I haven't joined your fruity little club.
Good luck--may your false pride and wanton disdain for others take you to great new heights.
I rate it... 4 out of 5 donuts!
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
I'd imagine that "success in the real world" implies high earning and/otr high aademic qualifications. And there probably is a correlation between this and a high IQ.
It is also true that some people are extremely intelligent by most tests, but have a low IQ. Of course, BMI is similar. Power lifters have an abnormally high BMI, but that weight is all muscle, so could not possibly be considered obese. But it doesn't matter when you have a large enough sample. These anomolies are statisically insignificant.
The average person has an IQ of 100.
Someone with an IQ of 100 is, in my general experience, pretty fucking thick.
50% of the population are more stupid than that.
Back to the matter at hand - I've often wondered if there was a correlation between obesity and stupidity, because it just seemed that way to me. And I've also wondered whether the chicken or the egg came first - are stupid people predisposed to getting fat, or does eating the sort of shitty diet that makes you fat also make you stupid?
There is a relationship between a person's BMI and how well they did on this test, but that doesn't mean that one thing caused the other. I'd want to see more information on how they were tested first, and if variables like level of education were kept under control. At least in America, our poorest and least educated are at the greatest risk of obesity, at least in part because the cheapest food is the unhealthy food.
I think most people including the poster and the scientists have confused the cause with the effect. People with lower cognitive function, dont realize they are full and have eaten enough and hence eat more and become fat. [Mods, please forgive my pathetic attempt at humor.]
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Hey! I'm a Mensa member and ... Oh, never mind, it's acutely accurate. *sigh*
Illegitimi non carborundum
BMI and IQ aren't perfect measurements of their stated goal. They at least provide an approximation though.
It is the people who don't think they mean anything at all usually are either fat or stupid.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
...so, the question is, do people *honestly* doubt this? On average? Is this really that surprising? I would say the data is totally inconclusive as it stands now, but if it were possible to do a study on twins (n > 100 if possible), separated and allowed to grow and be nurtured independently, but with comparable education, the fatter ones, on average, will be dumber. This isn't something mean, it's a very clear statement of nietzsche's philosophies. To be fat is not 'natural'. It is very much a 20th century invention, and I think we'll find more and more that it will correlate with decreased cognitive function.
It can be the other way around, I have a crazy high IQthough hve never reallyachieved mypotential so I tend not to put too much wieght in IQ tests.
...but I am glad to hear it :o)
Let all be punished in heck, I say!
Wikileaks, no DNS
My father by most peoples definition is brilliant. He is a scientist, he speaks several languages, he is a published author of several highly regarded books both fiction and nonfiction.
Despite all this intelligence he refused to take care of himself, got obese, had several heart attacks and then a series of massive strokes. For decades his doctors told him to lose weight, to stop eating junk food, to drink more water, to exersize and he ignored not only his doctors but his family and friends too.
Now he can barely talk, his mobility is severly limited, he has problems reading and all he does is watch tv.
Was my dad smart or dumb? I used to think he was brilliant but now I realize that he was dumb. Too dumb to prioritize, to take care of the important things in life. The time he took to learn that one more language or to write that one more book should have been spent taking walks or something.
I know lots of "smart" people who are actually dumb like that.
evil is as evil does
what were we talking about again... oh yeah theres my twinky
MISSING - Sig file. 2 years old black and white and very funny. If found please email me.
I'm not trying to be stupid either. I know of quite a few people who idolize certain other people who ae said to be succesful. They wouldn't measure thier levels of success without the pain and missery associated with thier hero's success. It is almost the same as the saying "no pain- no gain". But On the plus side, the mor emisserable something is, the more pleasurable othe things can be. The constant feeling of being needed and nurturing a company to success in some situations replace traditional parenting and family roles other would have. Vacation from the worst job in the world, even though you didn't leave the house for a week can be more rewarding then a trip to the bahamas were a person enjoys thier job.
I would agree with you. But i think this is more opinion then anyting. To others it might be the chalenge of over comming the stress and unhappiness that actualy makes them enjoy what they are doing. I know the feeling of satifaction is greater when finishing a job that was dificult and had a high probability of failure. I could name a few situation off the top of my head if your interested. (Of course they would be just personal experiences and end up in my blowing my own horn so it is probably best left alone.)
Several have pointed out that most studies (including this one) can usually only find correlation. It is extremely difficult and expensive to find the direction of causality in any correlation (not to mention teasing out intermediating effects and confounders)... But it seems very likely to me (sidestepping the otherwise worthwhile debate on BMI being a good measure of obesity) that rather than obesity causing low intelligence, the direction of causality might be the other way around: Low intelligence persons gradually getting fat.
My thinking on this stems from an anthropological concept known as the 'thrifty gene hypothesis'. Its an idea which essentially states that: in times of projected shortages in food, genes which store as much energy as possible might be advantageous as a survival mechanism and thus may be selected for. Thus if a person who is genetically stupid, and knows it (subconsciously or not), and projects that there is less hope of getting a good stable job as a means for sustenance and survival, he/she will be more likely to activate the thrifty gene to store up energy to compensate for a projected lack of occupational marketability.
The numbers of a desireable BMI between 22-25 are from insurance actuarial tables. The people who lived the longest, and with the feqwest illnesses had a BMI between 22-25 on average. People with higher BMI than 25 did not live as long.
So, yes, it IS a useful measurement. Yes, it does not necessarily take into account very muscular people, but that's a small segment of the population, and so this still applies.
Humans were meant to be lean - do you recall seeing any porker sized hunter-gatherers?
..........FULL STOP.
I mean consider the cost of good food vs bad food. I can go to McDonalds and get 2 double cheese burgers for $2 and some change. That's enough to fill me up for lunch and I'm a big guy. It's also a ton of fat and calories. Now let's say I want to go get a nice chicken salad from any of the number of places that serve them. That starts at about $6 and can be as much as $10. Also it's not going to fill me quite as much as the burgers.
Is it any wonder those with lower income would opt for the McDonalds food?
Addi tonally, many lower wage earners need to work longer hours or more jobs to make ends meet, which again tips the scale in favour of unhealthy food. Sure I can make a nice chicken and rice dinner that's pretty healthy for not too much money. However, it'll take me an hour or so to do. Not a problem if you work 40 hours a week, but if you are just ending a 10+ hour day? Forget it, you stop at the first fast food place on the way and grab that.
So if I were to guess I'd say that is a major factor. The less you make the harder it is to eat well. There also may be something to lower IQ translating to worse decision making capabilities, but I'm betting the economic reality of the situation is the main factor.
And I'm not just saying that cause I was rejected. No, really.
Of course, that may be academic to you ;)
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Has a 32 inch waist, some ridiculously low resting heart rate, and is in better shape than some of his body guards.
So.... there goes THAT theory.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Back in 1800's Britain, anyone who was fat was considered prosperous and of good breeding stock. Many of those people got to where they were by being smart (though others got there by being uninhibited). Of course, they did have a different kind of diet altogether, where fattening things cost more than healthy foods. I don't really mean anything by this post, but it's sort of interesting to think about how the tables have turned since then.
Obviously the people with a higher BMI couldn't remember as much as they were constantly thinking of what to stuff their mouths with for brunch, lunch, tea, dinner, supper, and various hourly snacks.
Being healthy with a good stamina means you'll usually be less tired and have an easier time to concentrate on things, and your mind simply works quicker if it has a better oxygen supply. People with poor stamina often feel tired at work, even if it's not a physically demanding work, like if they had slept too little. This can in large come from one's physique, and I personally felt a dramatic difference once I just switched from car to bike to work (I actually live a perfect distance from work so in my case it was a working solution to integrate exercise with work and make it regular; what's also very important in exercise).
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
This explains SO much.
It has some power to predict academic performance, but that is not what it is designed to measure. Nor is it particularly good at it. Just as in business, non-IQ abilities (hard work, emotional strength, social skills, mental stamina, valuing achievement and status) play a role in academic success. Predicting academic performance from IQ is like predicting a car's range from its engine efficiency.
It depends on what you mean by success :-) If by success you mean money and coercive power over people, then yes, MBAs tend to be more successful than PhDs. When they say that academic politics are nasty because the stakes are so small, they mean that there is less of that kind of "success" to go around, and people with an appetite for it are bitterly unhappy in academia.
Fortunately, most academics measure themselves differently :-)
I think the article made a bad assumption that poor memory equals low IQ. I consider Albert Einstein to be fairly intelligent, yet he was known to have bad memory. Poor memory recall does not equate to poor reasoning ability. Thank God for that.
Anyway, I've seen studies equating High Blood Pressure to poor memory function. Since obesity is a contributing factor to high blood pressure, it seems logical for the obese group to have poor memory recall.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Good thing he has a low BMI otherwise we would all be fucked.
For just one example of a flaw in IQ test interpretation, how can a one or two hour test (or, often, an even shorter one), possibly measure the difference between two individuals who are not necessarily mentally quick, but where one will keep worrying at a problem for hours, days or even weeks until he gets it, and the other will just let the problem drop when success doesn't come quickly? This difference generally gets called by other names, such as mental endurance or tenacity, rather than intelligence, to avoid addressing its real significance. In reality, it certainly is a factor of overall intelligence and it certainly has a significant impact on success in the real world.
Who is John Cabal?
Athletic supporter = jock strap.
Academic supporter = Mensatrap? Menstrap?
And look, another post by someone who IS in a group about how he or she is sick of people insulting his group because they're "not smart enough to get in," followed by his reasoning for what the group does indeed suck.
You go off on "jocks" despite having NO provocation because the parent post was about Mensans being stupid, if their magazine can be used to adequately measure them. No mention of jocks. Are you so ignorant that everyone is either in Mensa, or conversely, is a jock? If that's your argument then you show an alarming lack of logic.
Now, your erratic punctuation, style and grammar seem to paint you as someone new to the English language, or perhaps not too bright. Would I be right in judging all Mensans (or apparently all non-jocks) based on this example of their "literature"?
I'm also too stupid to understand what "In fact, I would go so far as to say that they freaks that value their appearance in a magazine are pretty much the worst of the bunch" even means. Are you saying that those that value their appearance as presented in the magazine are the worst of the bunch, or that those reading the magazine that value the appearance of those in it are the worst? Are you saying that the belt-loop missing individuals are freaks that choose that as an image to present, or that those who make an effort to not miss belt-loops are freaks because they cared enough to correctly apply belt-to-pants? And are they the worst of the Mensans, the worst of the people featured in the magazine or the worst of some other group?
As for Mensa looking good on your resume, surely you must realize that "looking good" is subjective. You'd be surprised to know that making the football team in college "looks good" to many law firms, despite its lack of academic showing because many people are as impressed with physical prowess as with academic prowess. Conversely, I've seen a number of resumes where the writer thought mentioning his appearance in Who's Who looked good. Apparently they didn't read various reports and articles about the lack of any qualifications or standards of peer review these Who's Who publications go through or how they literally include ANYONE willing to pay for a copy of the book. We won't even include the people that pay to insert fraudulent entries as a test. Back to resumes, some people think that scuba diving and scrapbooking looks good. I'm as impressed by a scrapbooker as I am by a Mensan.
Back to the jocks, since you look at the jock magazines to judge them by (and apparently the frat boys and drug-junkies since you have a diverse subscription base), then you are no doubt aware that they are all groups you could not get into. While you argue that his ability to throw a football that could break your arm is of no real-world consequence, he would argue that your ability to solve a sudoku faster than him has no real-world consequences.
You are apparently ignorant in the way this game works. Now, and for the rest of your life, you will continue ranking yourself as either better than or worse than everyone else. The key to winning lies in the selection of qualities you judge. You're better than the other people in Mensa because they're wrong about what they say and you don't care about their crap, and you're better than non-Mensa people because you read magazines about jocks (whatever that term means you you) and don't care about that stuff either.
The parent post is about reading a Mensa magazine and feeling superior because they don't care about that crap either, so does that mean that if they don't care about jock magazines and drug literature that you two are equal? No! Because you then say that you are better than he is because you ARE in Mensa, but aren't one of the freaks. And he will say that he is better because he's not in Mensa and thus, isn't one of those freaks. Some factory working single mother is going to insist that SHE is in fact better than bot
That's because the intelligent people with fulfilling careers and relationships have no need to join MENSA, as they interact with enough intelligent people in everyday life.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
IQ is a _bit_ more than pure 'academic' potential. In fact, I would say that academia has as many pockets of mediocrity as business and for much the same reason. (I am an academic.)
:)
MBAs may be making more money, but it is a passing fad. This is not to say that businessmen are becoming obsolete but rather that the self-justifying social network of MBAs is, rightly, going extinct. Just as IQ itself is a statistical construct, likewise its advantage is most clear in the limit as time and sample are large - otherwise, the sheer variance of 'success' in the large population of MBAs will pull your attention to the outliers. Intelligence gives no/little advantage against any given conspiracy of dunces, but during the interstitial periods and in 'new areas' it is the only way to get ahead.
In other words, MBA skills are relatively useless except in times of (relatively) extreme economic stability. Shake things up a little bit, and even pure mathematicians are more valuable to society.
(A lot of this applies to established academic fields as well, mutatis mutandis. It actually applies to all organized human endeavor with attached formal certification system.)
nt
Forget, for a moment, the old mantra that 'correlation does not prove causation'. Assuming for the sake of argument that there is a causal relationship, wouldn't it make far more sense that it would go the other way; i.e., being stupid leads people to not look after their health and become obese?
BMI is an inaccurate measure of body fat. It compares weight versus height. Keeping in mind that muscle weighs more than fat, it is entirely possible that you could have someone who is the epitome of health and have a high BMI because they have a lot of muscle.
Also, one of the basic things that science teaches us is that the correlation between to things and a relationship between them are two entirely different things.
Additionally, measuring IQ has never been an exact science. There has been debate regarding the accuracy of IQ tests since thier inception, and it's not likely to be a debate that is going to be resolved soon. When measuring IQ lots of things come into play, such as the person's cultural background, or their ability to take tests (while some people are smart, they sometimes freeze up during tests... it's called "test anxiety").
So, in conclusion, we have two somewhat inexact sciences put together and some french scientist thinks that their might be a correlation between the two.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Yes, yes, we believe you. Really. We do.
* George W. Bush's SAT --- 566 Verbal, 640 Math. Total score: 1206.
* SAT-to-IQ estimator. --- that score means an IQ of 129.
Circumcision is child abuse.
The score on an IQ test is relative to the sample the scoring method was calibrated against. If I go into a room and take an IQ test by myself, will I automatically be assigned a score of 100? No. I'll be given a score that indicates how I compare to a reference sample. Since some popular tests remain in use for decades, and correlations between new tests and old tests are carefully studied, it is quite possible to assign IQs to members of a sample S according to a scale calibrated for a mean of 100 on a different sample S'. Then there is no guarantee that the mean IQ over S is 100.
That means you can estimate (presumably by some statistical method based on correlations between modern IQ tests and those given fifty years ago) the mean IQ of current testees on a scale calibrated to data from fifty years ago, or vice-versa.
Of course this raises the question of what his "character" is after all, and whether you should at least have one of the two things the article was talking about.
Well, I've received an invitation to Intertel, and depending on which IQ test you prefer, I qualify for the Triple 9 Society, but not Prometheus. So, from the eyrie of my formidable intellect, I judge BeeBeard to be the more articulate, thoughtful poster.
Smart people who don't realize that intelligence is only one dimension of a well rounded person - who are arrogant about their intelligence - truly are stupid.
Speaking of arrogance, I'm 43, my BMI is 20, my body fat is 10% and my resting pulse is under 50bpm. So Pthththththt!
MENSA is for the people that need to belong to an organization in order to feel smart and have something to brag about.
The people I've known that had a MENSA membership were the borderline smart people if you would. They're not the people that're going to go out and do something neat. They'll probably be a slightly above-average employee. Not saying that they're dumb, but they're also not the people that you look at and think, "Wow, that guy's bright!"
I gained A LOT of weight during this big system rollout several years back. One noticable change? clothes are tighter and there is less room to breathe. So I took smaller breaths. I've heard more oxygen to the brain helps in all sorts of ways. Perhaps this is one (of many?) obvious reasons why obesity could lead to lower IQs.
You mean the BMI is not an accurate indicator of something that someone is promoting it as an accurate indicator of.
I call BS. There's a huge gap between "normal" and "obese," so I believe you're "technically" making stuff up. For a 5'9" man, normal is less than 169 pounds. Obese is at least 203 pounds. Are you telling me you lose that much muscle mass (relative to your height) in two months because it's rainy outside? Complete and utter nonsense.
BMI is useful for its intended purposes:
1. In research, as a mediocre but cost-effective proxy for body composition.
2. In a clinical setting, to beat ignorant, delusional people over the head with it and say "YOU HAVE A PROBLEM! SCIENCE SAYS SO! ADMIT IT!" (It isn't meant to be used on people who have the slightest clue. Just on, oh, about 50% of the US population. It may be unsound in principle, but it's better than their current thinking about their weight.)
Perhaps he had a high IQ, but a lower EQ.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
*Ducks*
Even that oversimplifies the situation. The study tied memory recall to high BMI, not to obesity. A high BMI does not necessarily make someone obese. I'm 5'8" and 190 pounds (173cm and 86kg for those outside North America), and my BMI says I'm not far from being obese. But I wear size 33 jeans (84cm). A lot of people I know have similar proportions.
So the question is, did this researcher choose people who were visibly obese for his high-BMI subjects, or did he mix in any muscular participants? Were all of the "fat people" pear-shaped, or were there a representative number of beer guts? Without that information, his results are worthless because they do not compensate for body morphology.
Then again, maybe the fact that steroids make you stupid would cancel some of the bias. ;)
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Their study is bogus. Obesity has been already linked to depression, and everyone knows that the depressed person has more problems with memory and with cognitive thinking. So they spent all of that money on the study for nothing. Obesity Linked to Depression, or Vice Versa Obesity and Depression
Aargh! For crying out loud, the test was ability to recall words, not IQ. People with amnesia/altzheimers aren't necessarily "stupid", eg, you wouldn't ever see them looking into loaded guns' barrels..
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
There is a correlation between obesity and poverty. The average IQ of those in poverty is lower than that of those not in poverty. Simply based on those two facts, one would expect the average IQ of obsese individuals to be lower than that of non-obese individuals.
It seems more likely that a low IQ would, in general, contribute to a persons lack of self control and cause a higher chance of being ob ease. Rather than a persons BMI affecting there intelligence.
It is not altogether surprising. Another report (I can't remember which Medical Journal) pointed out that vascular decline is associated with sudden aging and senescense. It sought to answer why some people are still running around fit and being able to look after themselves at 80 while others are having problems at 60. Loss of vascular function results in people starting to move around slower, and subsequently experiencing even more problems - weight gain.
"Alternative" medicines: Fish oil, ginkgo, vitamin E, red wine are all known to promote blood circulation. No wonder these are called "brain food".
Before you go racing off on more wine though, there might be a balance between blood circulation and prevention of cancer. Too much blood flow might result in cancer cells being "fed".
I just can't escape you.
My twitter
I go to Caltech (freshman). People here are quite brilliant, I assure you. Yet, despite the fat nerd stereotype, I have met _nobody_ I would consider fat (except one custodian). Everyone seems in the skinny to normal range. Sure, I haven't seen everyone on campus, but I was definitely expecting much less skinniness.
*Shrug*.
"May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan."
I've visited the Calista Flockhart jet propulsion lab here in Tasmania, they're working on a new solid vomit booster.
Task Mangler
So BMI isn't perfect. But it's clearly better than pure weight numbers, since it's adjusted for height.
Do you have an alternative easily computed number you think better measures obesity?
Or do you just think we should not try to measure it?
How about learning some science. Much of what we call intelligence is highly malleable. There is a growing body of research that shows that talent doesn't really exist. Smart, talented people are made, not born. Even athletic prowess has been shown to be environmentally determined.
e (PsychologicalReview).pdf
h tm
v olution_v2.swf
Here's a paper that shows that musical talent is mostly a matter of practice. http://www.freakonomics.com/pdf/DeliberatePractic
Here's link to some papers that show that athletic prowess is mostly determined by the month you were born. http://www.socialproblemindex.ualberta.ca/relage.
Here's a link to Lauren Resnick. http://www.lrdc.pitt.edu/media.htm She points out that iq can be changed.
Beauty? Check this out. http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/home_films_e
What you are spouting is popular prejudice not science.
people who live within 100 miles of Paris were 99% more likely to respond to an invading army by surrendering.
Hell in the 80's every single teen movie seemed to have the smartest be like the fat dude!
It's a well known fact that lower class people (poorer) have a much higher rate of obesity because of all the cheap food these days is high calorie junk food. It's also well known that lower income people generally have lower IQs. The scientists doing these tests are obviously idiots. And no, I'm not fat.
Thank goodness I don't have a job spending all day sitting in a chair staring at an LCD screen. Oh, wait!
[Insert pithy quote here]
30% of Americans fat and stupid
Bush approval ratings still around 30%
Coincidence?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
This is such crap.
IQ has nothing to do with BMI whatsoever.
My IQ puts me in the top 0.001% of the population according to every IQ test I've ever taken, from various groups and organisations including MENSA, but according to these silly Frenchmen, I should be near the bottom because of my body insulation.
Why is the "muscleheads" stereotype that of a physically fit man with the IQ of a turnip?
Why is the "geek" stereotype that of a physically unfit man with a genius IQ?
Besides, if physical fitness is such an indicator of intelligence, then how do they explain the "fittest" US President ever, George W. Bush?
-- This sig for rent.
> "French scientists have linked obesity to lower IQ"
Though how could this explain the average BMI George Bush, surely the stupidest man in America?
Actually, that's not true. We've been raising the average IQ for years. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect.
It took me a few minutes to decide the best comment to attach to.
It appears to me that one point of this discussion is not having the correct terms to separate our concepts with. Memory and its related processing is data/knowledge/information. No action is implied.
Standard IQ, measured on the classical tests, tests for conceptual throughput capability in areas such as math, language, spatial, and so on. However, thundering mountains of things are not gauged on the classical tests.
Daniel Goleman publicized his term for the missing elements. "Emotional Intelligence". Now that more accurate terms are present in the discussion, I would describe the poster's father had a very high conceptual ability indeed. However, his "Emotional Intelligence" was indeed very poor, and evenually caused a tragic loss of his former abilities. Please, recall his former glories, and treat him as a mixed character whose faults finally outweighed his gifts.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It sounds like a weird comment from me, but are smart people just more likely to be skinnier, not because being fat makes you dumb, but because being smart makes you skinny? People who are intelligent may be more likely to earn more money. I think people who earn more are more likely to buy healthy, low-fat food. People who are intelligent may also be more aware of the benefits of a healthy diet.
I think this article is interesting, but it is a long way from showing that being fat makes you dumb, and skinny people are smart. There may be many other factors at work.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
I always thought that the phrase "real world" excluded academic achievement by definition.
I can't remember all the details, but in the 80's Westinghouse corporation (which has built the nuclear steam supply system for over half the nuclear units in the US) built a factory and was well along getting NRC approval for "floating" nuclear power plants in the US. Of course, then the bottom fell out of the market for large base-load generating plants. I put "floating" in quotes because it was really a barge based reactor and generator that was built in a factor and then towed to a shore emplacement and grounded and surrounded by a sea wall.
I know of no comprehensive definition of intelligence that is agreed upon by a majority of scientists, but if you have evidence to the contrary feel free to provide it. Obviously, there isn't going to be any scientific definition of "success in the real world".
This is not true.
There certainly is a pretty well established definition of general intelligence 'g' used
in psychometric studies which has, contrary to what some people may desire, withstood many
challenges, and is logically and empirically consistent.
Essentially: you have a test of a multitude of widely varying tasks all of which are at some level, obviously "mental", and you measure the performance of people on all these varying axes.
Intelligence is the projection along the first principal component, reflecting the fact that people who do well on some of them, tend to do well, up to some degree, on most of the other ones.
This is a highly consistent phenomenon among all human groups tested.
It is correlated with numerous, objective, biological measurements in prospective, controlled experiments.
This is also a falsifiable hypothesis as well, as for example, performance on a number of
*other* tasks, most of which are probably less mental, significantly less
correlated with 'g', except probably among the very lowest tail which reflect significant disease or genetic disabilities with systemic effects.
Obviously, there isn't going to be any scientific definition of "success in the real world".
No not in a comprehensive sense but you can definitely come up with specific proxies which approximate it, and quantify it fairly well. For example, 'felony imprisonment' is clearly 'not successful' by almost everybody's standards.
First, because I haven't seen anyone point it out yet, the actual journal article is Neurology 2006;67:1208-1214. Go to http://dx.doi.org/10.1212/01.wnl.0000238082.13860. 50 and the server will redirect you appropriately. The journal's Web site should let you read the abstract for free. To read the whole article, you have to pay, or find a suitable institution with online or print access to this journal.
Now, some comments. The idea that correlation doesn't imply causation is correct, but this paper used a multivariate analysis to attempt to control for several possible confounding factors. I count twelve that the authors thought about and included in some of their models: age, sex, educational level, diabetes, systolic blood pressure, daily alcohol intake, physical activity, perceived health score, perceived stress score, energy, social isolation, and region of residence. It looks like the paper acknowledges more confounders than anyone's mentioned here on Slashdot so far. Ultimately, though, this paper is a cohort study, so you can still argue that they missed a confounding factor. If you can think of a legitimate one, you stand a good chance getting it published in the journal Neurology.
Next, naming intelligent friends with high BMIs or famous thin people with questionable smarts does not change what this paper says, of course. Let's even pretend to add those people to the data. Now we have 2243 subjects instead of 2223. I doubt that changes the results much, but I admit I can't prove that. Counterexamples do tell us something very important, though. If high BMI really causes worse word-list learning, it is still one of a staggering number of other effects on this measure, and it by no means excludes anyone from higher intelligence.
Lastly, people are right to wonder what cognitive tests like word-list learning really measure. This paper didn't use IQ directly, but the point still stands. The authors know this and address it, too. "The functional significance of cognitive changes in our sample is difficult to assess.... We did not collect any direct index of work performance." In fact, they don't know whether differences in these psychometric test scores apply to "this healthy working population." BMI, too, may represent a surrogate marker. The association in this paper still stands, although I don't see anything about whether active weight loss attempts change cognitive point measures or decline. Yes, there are other markers of cardiovascular risk, and these include waist circumference (Am J Cardiol 2006;98:1053-1056), which someone could study in the same way that the Neurology paper studies BMI.
So what's the point? The point is, the differences in these cognitive tests concern some people. The results suggest that some real effect on cognition exists, and the authors mention a few reasonable mechanisms for the effect. If you agree that a normal BMI leads successively to less diabetes, less coronary artery disease, and less chest pain when you walk around, then it makes sense to try for a normal BMI if it's even possible that it will save blood vessels in your brain, or your brain cells directly, or whatever mechanism you believe. It wouldn't surprise me, though, if weight loss merely slows cognitive decline or lessens the risk, rather than positively improving intelligence or some similar claim. The other point is that newspapers check sources and strive to do it very well, but they rarely offer substantial analysis of original research. They will quote authorities regarding the research but leave item-by-item discussion to commentary articles in specialty journals. Even my couple hundred words here only begin to address the reasonable analysis of this or any scholarly article.
"That's the highest anywhere." Technically, this is incorrect; Nauru has has higher levels of obesity (84.7% for males and 92.8% for females). Apparently, introducing a high caloric diet (as a result of prosperity from phosphorous mining) on a population that is used to living on a low caloric diet does wonders for the inhabitants' wealth. http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://www.na ture.com/nature/journal/v423/n6940/full/423599a.ht ml
I, for one, welcome our new, fat, retarded overlords.
Bitter much?
Emotional range.
Specific insight (the lack of which leads to that haughtyness you mentioned).
Empathy.
Self awareness.
Social skills.
I figure if I just drop some of the above, and reserve most of my mental capacity for the taking of IQ tests, then I would be a genius also.
You are where you are at the time you are there.
I think they have been looking at this the wrong way, not that Fat people are likely to be less intelligent, but less intelligent people are more likely to be Fat.
If someone is of below average intelligence, they are more likely to be fooled by fast food advertising, more likely to eat crap, and less likely to realise that eating healthy and being active is a requirement for a good lifestyle.
Those who are intelligent, eat healthy and excercise.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
No, of course not. We're fat BECAUSE we're stupid.
"Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son." - Dean Wormer
--
make install -not war
Hmmm maybe I should pass people thru quicker to 3rd line support if the BMI is in the target range ...
It has nothing to do with EI. It's called self control and common sense.
I've read that the people who are most successful - at least in the commercial sense of getting rich or being the head of a large company - tend to be well above average in intelligence but not the most intelligent. The reasoning behind this observation is that those in the second tier feel they have something to prove, and are driven to succeed. Those in the first tier do what they like, which tends to be academic or scientific pursuits. In this they are satisfied, and they are not driven toward financial supremacy.
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The French do not eat "healthy foods" by any measurable standards. I think the US's problem is that we rush eating and food preparation, while they enjoy it and eat slow. And they don't go on yo-yo fad diets that make the problem worse.
Table-ized A.I.
They should try attending a Mensa meeting sometime...
I'm thinking laziness may be the common factor here. If you are lazy and don't challenge yourself to exercise then your BMI goes up. If you are lazy and don't challenge yourself mentally, your IQ goes down.
There are other factors like being unfit means you get less oxygen to the brain, and high BMI people are less likely to be fit and healthy on average. But I feel these factors would have far less effect on the correlation than their general lack of application would.
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I eat fries and Bigmacs every single day and it hasn't........what was I gonna say?
Table-ized A.I.
The word you are looking for is "wise". Wisdom and intelligence are not the same; lack of wisdom regularly causes immense harm.
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Interesting post - I don't think fat people are dumb. I just think they're lazy.
My friends and I have an ongoing argument about 'metabolism'. I've always been had a relatively skinny/athletic build, and my friends keep saying it's only because I have a 'high metabolism', and that I'm lucky I'm not like them because otherwise I'd be fat.
I take exception to this because from my perspective, I'm really careful not to get fat. I eat a balanced diet - sure, I have a Big Mac now and then, but much more often I'm eating Subway. I drink a bit, but not every night and rarely to excess. I excercise several times a week - lots of soccer and when I'm not to tired from work (a relatively demanding IT job, which I think also helps) pushups and stuff.
Most of the fat people I know aren't dumb - they just don't care that they're fat. Sure, they're prepared to whine and complain and blame heaps of different things, but at the end of the day - they're just not actually prepared to do anything about it. Fad diets, half-assed excercise regimes - none of that crap is EVER going to work unless you WANT to lose weight, and until you get to that point, nothing will happen.
isn't the real rain man a chubby fatso type geek? i thought he was and don't say he is an exception. "Let it rain, Let it rain,..." Oh wait?
Hey, I'm fscking tall, probably 30 cms more than you, yet weigh the same. And I'm often thinking that I'd like to be a bit lighter. Sorry to burst your bubble, but by the description, you sound overweight. Well, perhaps not by American standards. Come on people, I know this is slashdot and all, buy some exercise won't kill you.
Stupid people get fatter than smart people. Smart people know they are getting fatter so they stop eating so damn much. Being fat doesn't make one dumber. Or it is not correlated at all, they could have picked a set of people that would fit the results they were looking for.
TA does not mention IQ at all. Only one time in the headline, a few times in the Slashdot summary, but not once in the actual article. The researchers gave them a vocabulary test, not an IQ test.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
There's no such thing as wisdom. It's a concept invented by non-smart people who resent smart people. It makes them feel better to be able to say "he might have been smart but he wasn't wise".
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Well that explains the link between american stupidity and obesity :)
I said "I know of no..", so naturally unless you know my mind better than I do, my statement is a fact.
As far as the main point is concerned, I don't doubt that there are scientists who think that IQ tests are valid, but repeatable results of an experiment across a large population doesn't prove anything about what is actually being measured.
I used the adjective "comprehensive" quite deliberately because the more narrowly you define intelligence, the easier it is to "measure" and the less meaningful the measurement becomes.
Speaking of MENSA... I doubt they have many spanish speaking members. The name of the org right there tells me I'm NEVER gonna join it. They're online IQ test is kind of fun, but dammit I'm from Los Angeles and there's no way in hell I'm telling all my buddies I joined some club called MENSA!
Guys, if there's ONE thing you take away from his whole discussion, please remember that MENSA = STUPID!
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Actually, this is pretty much entirely incorrect. The purpose of an IQ test is to measure educational potential. Specifically, IQ tests are designed to determine how well a child is likely to do in his or her educational career. They were actually initially designed to aid schools in determining where to place children in terms of their educational focus.
I disagree.
From Intelligence quotient
Although these tests were originally designed for predicting children's performance, they've long been adapted to many other purposes.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
The results do not surprize me the conclusion does. 1. We know that the higher a person education the more likely they will follow some kind of exercise regime. 2. We know that fitness and mental ability are related. 3. We know that most people that are obese are also unfit. 4. We know that mental ability just like fitness diminishes if not practiced. 5. We know that because of bias people think that obese people are considered dumb and are therefore not mentally challenged. My question therefore is how much of this is related to simply being unfit or not being mentally challenged. If I were to keep my fitness level up or keep myself mentally challenged and became obese would my mental facilities really fail ? For that matter if I were to challenge myself mentally everyday would it affect my weight :-) [Maybe we found a nicer way to lose weight]
I don't know. This sounds like the same sort of argument advocates of XP make: making broad assumptions about how people feel or act without any real evidence.
Trying to find some (psuedo) 'scientific' evidence to justify the stereotype that fat people are stupid. That way they can manufacture consent to criminalize fatness, need more cheap labor. They do it all the time with drug war propaganda.
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. Dwight D. Eisenhower
Thank you! I had just about given up on finding anybody else who had spotted that particular problem with the study.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
I know he is miserable now. Every day he lives with the inability to express himself, to be a spectator in life where he used to be a participant. He will live like this for at least the next decade if not longer.
I have thought about this for a long time and have come to the conclusion that he acted like a child who can't control his impulses. A child will spend any extra cash on candy unless they are thought and trained to save the money for later gratification. To him controlling his eating and exercising was too much effort and the benefits were too delayed. At every opportunity he chose instant gratification instread of doing something painful now to save himself misery in the future.
I do agree with you that he lead a full life, that he has a string of accomplishments that most people would find satisfying but I don't think that all somehow makes his present condition bearable. I know he is miserable, I see it every day.
evil is as evil does
First, do you have any evidence for this statement? Second, are you aware that, according to the Wikipedia article, only 0.08% of Mensa's "potential members" (people above the 98th percentile on various tests) have joined? You have a biased sample, and a tiny one at that.
My BMI is very low and shows me being underweight for my height... which is BS. Maybe for an average american... but my BONE structure; my FRAME is smaller than average; yet I have more muscle mass to help counterbalance it. I'm tall but lean with a small frame. I know people at the same height or even taller that have a similar frame that weigh much less.
Its not hard to fall out of the BMI scale on either end. Bodyfat analysis done with a consistent method (like water displacement) would be a better indicator IMO.
Actually, I suspect the real connection, is stress not BMI. A few years ago I was under several months of extream stress, despite
having a IQ in the top 1%, I started leaving the sink on and wandering away with it still running, losing track of my thoughts, etc, oh, and I put on 35lbs in about 6 months as I craved carbs during that time.
Both BMI and IQ are notorious measurements. Yet another "study" that uses correlation to imply casuation. This is not science. It is propaganda.
In a similar vein, I'm waiting for The Lancet's estimates of civilian deaths in Iraq to actually exceed the total population. It's like the number in the 1980's claiming X number of homeless Vietnam vets where X was greater than the number of soldiers ever sent there.
How'd they normalize their data? They normaized it the same way every other "scientist" of this ilk does: in a way to get the result they wanted when they started the "study".
Just about everyone is going to have a pet theory as to why this correlation exists. Most of them will be based on personal opinion rather than fact. Who knows how valid they are.
So, I have one, and here it is.
Keeping your mind sharp requires work and self-discipline. Keeping your body in good shape requires work and self-discipline. Therefore, people who are lazy and/or who are not self-disciplined will suffer in both areas.
And for what it's worth, I'm not trying to be all superior here. The reason I know both of these things can suffer as a result of laziness and a lack of self-discipline is that I've seen it happen to myself. Well, a better way to put that would be that I've let it happen to myself. Luckily, I hit a point where I got fed up with it and have mostly reversed the trend.
Ah ha! You have a BMI of 21 but are a complete and utter moron! His point is that he DOES weigh a heck of a lot for his height, he's a short guy but weighs as much as a big guy should weigh. But he also is not fat, 84 cm is a tiny circumference for an 86kg dude and unless he's got a gut the size of a bathtub above his pants he must just be dense for some reason. Even without fat, people just have different shapes and densities, some people float in water whereas some people sink. This dude however would sink in the dead sea. The point is, someone is fat when they have a lot of fat in their body, not when a ratio is over a threshold.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
In particular, they broke up BMI's into five groups: (1) 15-21.5, (2) 21.5-23.4, (3) 23.4-25.2, (4) 25.2-27.7, and (5) 27.7-45, where BMI's up to 25 are considered normal, up to 30 are considered overweight, and over 30 are considered obese. Even within the final group, not all the participants are obese.
It begs the question of why they didn't compare "normal" weight IQ's to "obese" weight IQ's, as this would be a big story and a more impressive research finding! It's likely that either they didn't have enough obese participants to satisfy statistical significance (so most of group (5) is actually individuals with BMI's of 27.7 to 30), or they didn't find that obese people had lower IQ's. When the BMI groups that they break up their data into as strange as this, and not at all the groups that are normally used in research papers, it begs the question of what kind of data massaging they had to do to find their conclusions. Did they try 100 different breakdowns of BMI groupings until they found one that (barely) satisfied statistical significance?
I remain skeptical as to the conclusions of this paper.
Er...you had me up until the Renaissance Festival comment. At least here, where the renfairs are a big deal, getting a shop and keeping it is a major accomplishment. It takes everything else you would expect to do running your own business, plus the ability to work outdoors (or in a musty shack) for 12 hours a day and stay in character while working the business. Not to mention you'll be traveling from fair to fair, and probably selling consignment or running an online store when the season is out. A lazy pseudo-intellectual would fail miserably, and probably end up deep in debt to boot.
I have not read the report cited in the article, so all I can tell from the article is that a vocabulary test given to 2,200 adults between age 32 and 62 and those with a BMI = 30 scored 44%. No other mention is given about the populace, their occupation or the testing methodology itself (e.g. was the test multiple choice? did they ask for written definitions? etc.)
Personally, I'd like to know a lot more about the test before I drew any conclusions. If the subjects were like most adults I know, they probably made no effort to prepare or learn the words and instead decided to pay attention to their lives. Forgive me for being skeptical, but if that's the case then I think the adults were behaving intellegently.
I think a better experiment would be to tell the people that the people conducting the study are covering the cost of having their employers give a raise or some additional vacation time to those who score in the top 5%
and then see if BMI has any relationship.
There might be a statistical link between obesity and low IQ, but that not mean it is directly related. Here is another example: it is a statistical fact that people with large feet earn more than people with small feet. The simple reason for this is that woman have smaller feet than men and earn less on average.
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Got proof of that? There was a wire-service article making this claim that got a lot of ink back in 2001, but it turned out to be a hoax.
Bush's SAT scores would put him in the top 16% of prospective college students, with an IQ around 115, statistically indistinguishable from the 119 of John F. Kennedy.
Moreover, Bush did very well on his military aptitude tests, so well that it is at least arguable that his IQ is in the 125-130 range and well above that of John Kerry.
Morons don't fly fighter jets without killing themselves, or get degrees from Harvard and Yale. George Bush's daddy may have got him into Yale, but he didn't get him out.
Too many people mistake a lack of glib speaking skills for a low IQ, especially when it confirms their own political prejudices. They are not the same thing at all.
Finally, genius-level IQ is not correlated very well with successful Presidencies, as Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter may testify.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
With the announcemnt of this study, the Crack Whoring Industrie Internationale (CWII) has announced that it is now an official sponsor of Mensa International. The new motto is "Crack: it's not just for breakfast anymore," and they will also feature a commercial that says "Try our all new all natural crack. Lab tests prove that it safely lowers your BMI, and French Scientists have proven that lowering your BMI raises your IQ. Get smarter the all natural way. Real California Crack. Now with 25% less seizures."
By the way, they're still searching for a poster boy, so if you know any good looking crack whores with 98%ile IQ, tell 'em to sign up ASAP.
Aside from the joke being completely wrong (pencils were used by both the US and Russia early on, stopped using them when a better alternative came along as pencils in a zero-G environment can actually cause a lot of problems), the Fisher Space Pen is pretty darn handy.
I like to sketch a lot, and on occasion, upside down and at other strange angles. While pencils handle this just fine, on occasion, you need ink. I prefer inks to pencils, actually. Before I found the space pen thing, I was frustrated quite often, because there weren't any ink pens that did anything close to a reasonably good job at writing upside down.
I think for most people, the pen would be a waste (other than the 'ooo nifty' factor), but for some people it is really handy (aside from people that go into outer space on a regular basis, that is).
I'd stretch to say that poverty is not so related to lesser intelligence as it would be lesser education. Have a look at some of the inventive ways poorer people do tasks that the richer ones buy expensive gizmos for. Furthering that, I'd say that poverty can be related to poor diet and/or lack of proper nutrition. This can also be related to obesity, and will more likely have the long-term effect of some developmental shortcomings.
High BMIs are well-correlated with obesity, because there are serious limits to the amount of muscle-mass that most people can have, while fat-mass can scale much further and much more easily. Sure, there are some people for whom it totally fails, but for a majority it is a good description (not as good as waist-to-hip ratio, but still good). And you KNOW that most people with high BMIs are adipose, not muscular. I can't figure out why, exactly, you would be contrary about it.
Just give this information to technocrats, and soon they'll use IQ tests to measure the Body Mass Index of a person.
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Technically, all the research team claimed was that they found a link. There is conjecture about about the source of the link, but that's all it is. Heck, the link could be caused by stupid people making bad decisions about food, or not being smart enough to remember when they last ate so they eat again sooner. Heh, it's fun to ascribe ridiculous behaviours to stupid people... Anyway, conversely, we know that the brain brains calories like nothing else, so it could also simply be that intelligent people think more and thus burn more calories, keeping them more slender. I know that when I'm in school, I crave steak and pizza and stuff like that all the time, whereas when I'm on break I tend to eat a lot of low-calorie low-grease stuff like peanut-butter sandwiches and fresh fruit.
Cause and effect may be confused here.
The study asserts that obesity affects your IQ, however I'd guess that IQ is more fixed than weight. This study could really be confirming that less intelligent people are more likely to become fatties in the first place.
What is it about correlations that makes people so irrational? Why do people suddenly try to dispute the very validity of science and statistics the moment any researcher publishes a correlation?
Seriously though. It's probably a mix of things. Thinking burns energy. Smart people generally have a better understanding of health issues, and can factor more health information into their decisions -- rather than simple thinking "fatfree=good" while cramming their gullet with foods that are nutrionally indistinguishable from pure sugar, or the opposite, thinking "atkins=good" while packing themselves with bacon and jerky. Intelligent people do things, like hobbies and reading, while the stupid can't handle hobbies or books and so spend more time watching TV -- an activity highly conducive to snacking (especially since so many ads play to the hunger instinct). Stupid people are more likely to be able to fooled by those gay posters for "loving all our natural sizes" (and here I use the word "gay" in the pejorative sense, not the festive or bum-love sense). Stupid people have a much greater capacity for self-deception regarding the consequences of their actions. Etc.
Any quantity can -- by definition -- can be measured in one number. If it can't be measured in one number, it's not a quantity. It's a vector, or a function, or tensor, or something like that.
What they have shown is that bad lifestyle habits correlate to low cerebral performance. It doesn't come as a surprise that general bad health isn't good for you. It's stupid to point the finger at obesity when it is only an outcome of bad health in general. I've recently lost over 40kg of body fat and noticed the positive effects of it on my brain. But the reason to it lies within exercise and eating healthier, not within my BMI.
This is probably the kind of correlation for which you can find dozens of causal links in both directions, common causes, etc. Correlations are often complex like that, particularly when you consider characterists as multivariate as intelligence and obesity.
So true. I find it interesting that most of the population would rather think of us as having some kind of gift than consider that our lifestyle might have something to do with our health/weight. In my case I can hardly argue the point with them however because I do have an ungodly fast metabolism, commonly needing more that 3000 calories a day. As a student the food bills are a bit of a problem :(
In my case I'v taken to referring to myself as 'superior' anytime someone suggests that it's only my metabolism that keeps me fit. If they argue I simply point out that it's what they were already saying...
May not convince anyone to improve their lifestyle, but it dose end arguments.
Let's see: Obesity causes several health conditions, two of them being http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickwickian_syndrome
Frankly, what these French guys found out counts as "stating the obvious" to me.
But are fat people stupid, or stupid people fat? Back to the old chestnut of correlation and causality.
Memory recall and IQ are correlated. And unlike memory performance, IQ is easily measured via a questionaire. When you need to ask hundreds to take part in your study, you often cannot use sophisticated emperimental designs. Or complete medical checkups, for that matter - of course BMI isn't perfect, but it made completion of the study realistic.
blow your mind already
And he also scores below average on a general IQ test ; but the man is so abnormal in many ways that it's not really fair to lump him in with the rest of the population.
From his general build he looks like he would fit in the classification of "Overweight" as opposed to "Obese". And as to whether it's decreased his abilities? Well, that would be rather like noticing that someone had taken a cupful or two out of the ocean.
Actually, they're just stating the obvious. Obesity is a major risk factor (read that as: causes) several breathing and sleep related disorders. If the brain doesn't get enough sleep and O2, and too much CO2, is doesn't work as well as it could.
It doesn't really take a genius to figure that if you have two large enough groups of people, the one with the higher BMI will perform worse at cognitive function tests.
I don't believe that a fast metabolism is some kind of genetic accident either. The base pathways we have for processing food for energy are incredible invariant in terms of genetics. I think that your personal biochemistry is something that can be "trained" as much as any other physical attribute.
I think a fast metabolism is the product of habits that promote a fast metabolism. Eating right. Getting off your ass and walking places. Taking exercise.
My weight is pretty much dependant on my exercise level. My present job isn't helping, as I commute four hours a day on the train.
I had an *enormous* metabolism when I was 18 - actually objectively measured in terms of liters of oxygen/minute consumed at rest, as I was a med student. But at the time I was a superfit highschool rowing star, walked more than five miles a day to get to and from campus, and worked out on a regular basis. And ate whatever the hell I liked.
These days I really have to watch myself - but exercise still has the most profound effect on my weight. And I shall be striving to improve matters, because I have a 2 year old daughter and I care enough about seeing her future to work harder on mine.
My wife is like a pocket dynamo - she's a foot shorter than me, half my body weight, and she has real trouble keeping weight on, because she's like the gentleman discussed above - she really can't seem to see the value of taking care of her body, although her tendancy is to run in the other direction, she's too busy with her job as a hospital doctor and her extensive social commitments to slow down, eat properly and regularly, take exercise, etc. When she does eat, it's more often than not total high-calorie crap, but she rarely gains weight... I wish she would, she needs to put on about 10 pounds of muscle mass, she's literally wasted away since I met her.
and I'd make an educated guess that, at least in Europe and America, both are linked with poverty.
The question is: are people who are lazy and dumb end up poor?
"Was my dad smart or dumb? "
He was smart if he lived how he wanted to. i.e. knew the risks and lived that way anyway.
Sorry, you're posting has too many typos so we had to mod you down -1 Fat .
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_implies_c ausation_(logical_fallacy)
No, the parent is a "flame". The grandparent was "flamebait" and thus attracted a flame.
is not what it measures - if you put it together with "How often do you work out?" you have a pretty good idea how much is fat, and how much is muscle. People who want to delude themselves will always find a way (try blaming your metabolism, your hectic life style, "you'll never see me in the gym with those" jockophobia etc). The biggest problem is that people decide to "get in shape" and use weight as their result metric. That typically means eating less and more exercise - except more exercise means more muscle and often a greater appetite. The difference between losing two pounds of fat versus losing five pounds of fat and gaining three in muscle, both for a net loss of two, is huge. Hell, even losing two pounds of fat and gaining three pounds of muscle would typically be an improvement both to your health and your figure, even if it's a net gain. For example a good way to "offset" the focus on weight could be for example taking your waist measure - if you've lost five cms of belly and put it anywhere else, chances are you look a lot better no matter your weight. For women this should hardly come as a surprise (combine with chest and hips for the classic three). That should get the measuring straighted out a bit.
The other question is what your BMI "should" be, but in my opinion it's fairly easy to tell when you have low body fat. People might be slender or muscular, but it's hardly a problem seeing if they have the kilos in the right place or not. It's simply a rough estimate of where your body should be given average muscles. Want to add 20 pounds of muscles? No problem. Just be sure you're not making it an excuse not to lose those last twenty pounds of fat. Check your abs, your measures, try the "jiggle" test and see if it's as firm as you want. There's plenty good metrics to use, and BMI is a good one used in conjunction with others. People that are problematizing measuring healthiness is using a Chewbacca tactic - that's not where the problem lies at all. Most of them just want a way to say "Because the metrics are imperfect, we can ignore the conclusions." That might work to disregard one dissenting metric, but if your BMI is too high AND your waist is too wide AND you aren't working out enough to build that kind of muscle AND everything jiggles when you walk then no way.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This rule, if indeed it is a rule, must have more exceptions than most. I've known a lot of skinny people that couldn't think their way out of a paper bag.
Then there's me: I'm not sure what I weigh with any great precision, but I've surely got to be over 200 lbs at the least, and my vocabulary routinely frightens people. Apparently I use "too many big words". I get complaints to this effect at least a couple of times a day, from people of all ages. Granted, "too many" is relative (certainly, *I* don't think I use too many big words), as is the size of the words in question (again, *I* don't think the words I use are all that large), and I live in the middle of a three-county-wide educationally depressed area, but nonetheless, plenty of the people who whine that they can't understand me and implore me to avoid the use of so much vocabulary are clearly much skinnier than I am.
In summary, my anecdotal evidence calls into question the universality of the study's conclusion.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I tell you what. He is definately not living the life he wants to anymore. As I said in another post he has at least a decade if not two living in his current state. Thanks to the marvels of modern medicine it might be another three decades.
I guess what I am trying to say is that part of intelligence is having a longer term outlook, being able to predict obvious future events, and taking expert advice.
evil is as evil does
I don't know about all the arguments, and whether IQ is relevant, but this guy is just stupid !
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I guess 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Here you pretended that the words between the phrases you highlighted didn't even exist. You read it as an idea that wasn't there. Do you not know what the word prideful means, and that's why you glossed over it like it wasn't even there? Do you always ignore words you don't understand or only when you post on
And your other reply is this schoolyard bullshit? You fucking suck at arguing.
There's a lot of smart obese people. I think this research is bunk. This reads like a typical french stereotype to me.
To be honest, although most MBAs might be successful at gaining money, they are often not particularly successful in terms of being contented. There's not much point in being rich if the result is stress and unhappiness.
The notion that rich people are unhappy is a myth. In reality, rich people are generally happier than middle- and low-income earners. The idea that money makes people miserable is a fairy tale perpetuated by poor people to try and console themselves regarding their own unhappiness.
Money can't buy happiness, but poverty guarantees misery.
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Bullish Machine Tzar
One friend used to claim that.
His trousers were perpetually under his protuberant belly.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Sounds like they might have a mild case of Asperger's Syndrome.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
So when you eat a lot do you become dumber or do stupid people eat a lot?
This research will no doubt make women ask "Do I look stupid?" instead of "Do I look fat?", with identical consequences. On the other hand, perhaps we'll soon have teenage girls who are obsessed with their IQ, which would be a good thing indeed.
Yeah. I suspect that really smart people don't perceive themselves as smart. The more you know, the more you realize how little you know. If you don't know anything, you're not capable of estimating your own knowledge - you don't know enough to know whether you know anything. Stupid people probably think they're pretty smart, while smart people probably constantly doubt their own intellect.
In order to be attracted by Mensa, you need a certain amount of stupidity which prevents you from understanding that being able to solve a bunch of IQ tests doesn't make you smart. It just makes you good at solving those tests.
As far as I can tell - and I don't think I actually know any Mensa member - Mensa members seem to be proud of their intelligence, which kind of proves that they aren't that intelligent.
Good thing I'm not a psychiatrist. I can't see the syndrome for the symptoms.
You are where you are at the time you are there.
so now, in addition to the stereotypes of fat people as jolly, self-indulgent, and lacking in willpower, we add stupid? how... charming.
Exercise, eh? How about commuting 22km a day by bike in Vancouver, which isn't exactly flat? Or rock climbing twice a week at a 5.10 level? Do that for a few months and see what happens to your BMI.
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First of all they didn't test the IQ, they tested the cognitive capabilities. The IQ defines your rational processing capability and should have nothing to do with your knowledge at all (Beside the fact, that such tests are impossible). The second thing is, that they found out, that people with a higher BMI are not so good in remembering things. But this could easily explained without a direct relation.
Most People with a higher weight, gain that weight by bad eating habits, which are often combined with less care about their bodies at all. Less body movement results in a lower oxygen rate in your blood, which results in a less active brain. This is old news. Also it is known that, better eating habbits come with a better life situation. And a better life situation has often to do with better education, which is related (partly) to more intelligent people or at least people which have a plan for their life. If you have no direction in life, you get dull and wll your brain too.
So my asumption is, that the BMI is a value which is somehow linked to the class in which people live but fat is not directly affecting their ability to remember thing.
In addition the BMI is not a clean measuring instrument for fat.
To do the study right, they should have analysed people doing the same jobs and have a similar life situation.
Yes, if you have a "crazy high" IQ, you've most definitely "never reallyachieved" your potential.
You must be really fat.
Check out size of US versus French portions of food (in restaurants for example). My impression is that French eat smaller portions of food.
Processed versus fresh food might also be a factor, has anybody done any research into the comparison of the amount of processed food people eat in different countries vs. less processed ingredients? Traditional French food is high in fat (butter, animal fats) but maybe it compares favourably in terms of processed crap? Is a portion of duck with fresh vegetables and boiled potatoes better than a Big Mac and fries with a processed milk shake for example?
I doubt he used introverted in the literal sense, but then, reading comprehension is not an extensive part of most IQ tests.
And no, not all nerds dress like idiots. Not to mention that you basically ignored all the points he made.
Mensa material, for sure.
*nod*, I always thought of my dad as one of the smartest people I knew, had his own fairly successful business as a programmer, and eventually started working as the IT Manager for my uncle's (very successful) oil company. He died suddenly while SCUBA diving, heart just stopped, likely because he was overweight (he hadn't got under the water yet, and no it wasn't his first time SCUBA diving, and he used to be quite active, and a Police detective, when he was younger. He'd failed a diving medical for being overweight, then lost some, passed it, then died in his first time out after that I think.. he was also doing stuff like learning Hebrew in his spare time (found a book on that next to his bed), and working all the time. I used to want to be like him, used to want to succeed in life, but after he died I wished I'd had more time with him, and that he'd cared more about spending time with us than working (I was 17, I have 3 younger siblings). I used to perform well in school, and found most of University pretty simple (did Computer Science, because my dad got me interested in that kind of stuff from a young age), but I just don't have the same drive anymore, don't have anyone to prove anything to. Have just turned 23 and am IT Manager at the same place my dad was, but I've lost any ambition of becoming a games coder or that kind of thing. Know I have potential but I don't even see the point in using it if it means that I don't spend time with friends and family (not that I'm the best person in the world for being sociable).
:p ). I must say that my girlfriend and I did notice the correlation between fat people and stupidity recently, with the US being a prime example (no offense you US people, at least the skinny ones..).
Anyway, in that little rant, I've agreed that there are better things in life than being 'successful'. I want to have enough to survive, provide for my prospective wife, and have a nice car. That's enough to be content (I hope
which is totally what she said
Actually, having studied and worked with a number of trully genial people in the past, i can definitelly tell you that being intelligent isn't the same as being smart.
There is quite a number of very inteligent people out there which are unhappy/unsucessfull because they are not smart enough (or brave enough) to navigate through the social minefield in academia/companies.
I myself, even though i have a high IQ (which i'm smart enough not to rub in everybody else's faces) consider myself a lot less smart than many people with (literally) less than 2/3s of my IQ.
PS: Note that what in my definition of smart, "street wise", for example, would be a form of smart.
The disproportionately high representation in groups like MENSA of lonely singles who earn below average salaries in unsatisfying jobs seems to counter your "decades of data" (which I have never seen.)
Not everyone who qualifies for Mensa applies. I think wanting to be a member of such a club is a sign of needing confirmation/admiration/respect/etc. A challenging and satisfying job with a high salary, and a loving and beautiful partner can fulfil those needs.
Dumb people tend to get fat.
Could it be just how a slim person spends his time verses how a fatter person might?
Yes, spot on. A link is merely a link and speaketh not as to what the exact relationship is. Does blubber make you dumber? Probably not. Does lack thereof make you smarter? Probably not. However, do body builders and fatter people alike tend to spend more time on their bodies (one way or another) than people that spend a majority of their time developing their minds? Probably so.Mr. Universe competitors are VERY LEAN and muscular, but this study looks as BODY MASS INDEX, which is a fundamentally flawed metric by which to measure a person's physical condition. The medical community should entirely abandon it in my opinion.
A BMI of 30 or more is considered obese, so if you are six feet tall and not much over 200 pounds you are considered obese. I think it's a safe bet that conidering BMI alone that every single serious competitive bodybuilder is obese. I am just under six feet tall and about 210 pounds and just fall into the "obese" category myself and I am NOT a competitve bodybuilder, though I am built on the muscular side and pretty health conscious (stay active, etc). Since I started getting it tracked I have had between 14 and 16 percent bodyfat, which is far from "competition level" but is generally considered "physically fit". This flies right in the face of the fact my BMI is 30 and tells me I'm obese.
So, if the headline is correct then most bodybuilders would be stupid and forgetful, as would I. I can't speak for bodybuilders but I do know that throughout school I scored well on aptitude tests (typically 95th percentile). How well such tests measure true intelligence is sometimes debatable, however they do indicate that I do well with symbolic logic and memory recall. I suppose I'm just a statistical freak, however I really do think that the persistence of BMI as a method of measuring physical health has more to do with its effectiveness as a merketing tool for the weight loss industry than any solid basis in science.
Much better studies would measure against metrics like precent body fat, cholesterol levels, caloric intake or overall diet, physical activity levels and so on.
Trough my whole life my weight has fluctuated between 230-300 pounds. At 230 I'm in excellent shape (I'm 6'3")and 300 I'm very fat. During my "healthy cycles" I feel really productive and generally can do much better in all aspects of my life including school. Tests are much easier speaking in public is easier, and my time studying seems much more efficient. When I'm fat ( like right now) everything is much harder. I lack the confidence to speak in public places or make presentations, I get distracted much more when I study and my social life is in shambles.
I realize that my weight is not the only factor that affects my productivity or mental acuity, but is one of them. When I'm in weight my mind just seems much more clear and I can acomplish much more without getting as tired. In my case at least being fat makes me dumber and less efficient, so my goals are endangered when I'm fat.
It's all about finding better ways
Interesting blanket assertion there. What's your proof?
The very people who make the current IQ tests don't entirely agree with you. For example, the WAIS (by far the most common test for adult intelligence, at least in the USA) defines three subcategorys of measurable intelligence which each get seperate index scores:
(a) Verbal Comprehension
(b) Spatial Perceptual
(c) Freedom from Distraction
So freedom from distraction over the typical two to four hour range of the test is 1/3 of the total score. Wechsler also predefines this short term measure to be extrapolatable to longer term behavior. This is presented essentially as a circular arguement - (c) is worth devoting a third of the questions/scoring to because it has long term predictive value, and it has long term predictive value because it makes up such a large part of the test. It's only after he essentially made that assertion spread over a series of paragraphs that Wechsler starts claiming that there's something called "drive", which is outside the range of the test to measure. He then remarks that "No amount of drive will make a dullard into a mathematician".
So, Dr. Wechsler's arguement is apparently that Freedom from Distraction has a great deal to do with Intelligence, but not with "Drive". (That's certainly counterintuitive to the way we normally define those words). He's also commenting on dullards, which I think we can safely assume means below scoring average people, and thus (by leaving the subject with only that remark, without further qualification) saying that what is irrelevant to predicting their success is equally irrelevant to the average or gifted individual - the chief point on which I disagree.
While it's not particularly relevant to the above points, it's interesting to note that the WAIS scoring manual remarks about one of the 11 subsections "It (Vocabulary) correlates very highly with Full Scale IQ". Presumably, the other 10 subsections don't have nearly such a high correlation. How can we justify claiming there's a strong correlation between IQ score and success if we can't even claim a strong correlation between 10 parts of the test and "Full Scale IQ"?
Who is John Cabal?
Careful, if you mention fuzzy, feelgood, newage concepts like that all the Mensa types will start to wizz around the room shrieking like sabotaged Daleks. Maybe some of them will explode too.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Maybe the higher BMI is just a loose indicator of someone who isn't all that brilliant. I mean, genetics asside, being obese doesn't seem like the smartest thing one could do to oneself.
IQ tests seems to measure education. Healthy personal nutrition and lifestyle takes a little education.
Maybe a similar study could be done simply by replacing the BMI qualitative with a measure of how much time the subject spends watching "Cops" etc... You would probably get more clearly defined results.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Testing change in BMI and change (if any) in IQ that is associated with it.
Yes, I completely agree that BMI is a poor metric in determining health, but it is the easiest one to generalize health. There are those who are "obese" when a proper body fat assesment would indicate lean, but those are more the exception than the rule. In most of the population BMI is a reasonable consideration.
If the study did look at the change in BMI and IQ then these results would actually mean something IMHO. A change means more than a one time measurement. If there was an accompanying change in IQ that correlated with the change in BMI then we'd have reason to take notice. If I were in charge of the study I would do an initial body fat assesment at the very least, and ideally one at the conclusion of the trial period. Then we'd have some useful data to look at.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
173cm and 86kg is heavy. Maybe you look normal among your fellow Americans, but it is heavy.
-b.
But that's purely nonsensical - because high earning and/or high academic qualifications do not say anything about how happy you are, and to me, happiness is the only reasonable measure of success. Well, that, and whether or not you're capable of supporting yourself. I think any reasonable measurement of success has to involve not burdening others. But then, some third person may disagree...
Personally, though, I do believe that happiness is the ultimate measurement. If you're not happy, you might as well kill yourself, because otherwise what's the point?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The primary task of academic studies is to identify the true reason for an observed correlation.
No it isn't. The primary task is to obtain data.
and the fact that the report has been published in a respected journal means for definate that the researchers have taken steps to ensure other obvious factors - like the ones you mention - are accounted for.
Not if it is only reporting it found a correlation. Which appears to be what happened. They apparently set out to see of there was a correlation between obesity and dementia. The study found and association, not explained a known association.
Funny, and mroe than a tad ironic, that you go off on another poster drawing conclusions about something he or she has presumably not read, and then proceed to do exactly that yourself. Does this mean you hate your own post, or do you exempt yourself from your "standards"?
According to the article (you might try reading that at least), the report makes suggestions about what may be involved as causation. For all we know the parent post may be dead on in that they may make this suggestion as well. but that suggestion would not make "good press". It is clear by the article that the report did not make a conclusion as to causation, it merely noted a correlation and suggested multiple hypotheses that may show causation. More specifically it notes a decline in ability to remember a group of words.
A different article on it noted:
Note again the lack of wording saying a high BMI caused the lower performance on the memory test. All reports on the study say that it reported a correlation. None say it studied what the potential causation is, or even that it established a causative effect.
What should be distrubing is the attitude of your post. Your attitude is one that says experts should be implicitly trusted and that "layfolk" should not think on their own or be skeptical or critical of it, even if only in the summary. If you want to bask in that point of view you are on the wrong site.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Poor people don't perpetuate myths like that. Hack authors and movie-makers perpetuate myths like that. It's poor people themselves who know better than anyone that some more money would ease a lot of immediate burdens in their life.
Re-read the quote you italicized. He didn't say money MAKES people miserable. He said some money-gainers aren't content, and therefore he thinks money in itself isn't the wisest of goals. The present topic is living a contented healthy life, not some nonsense about choosing "poverty" over money because of happiness, which nobody's proposed. You're being a reactionary, along with your mods, and you've only agreed with him by saying "Money can't buy happiness." --The implications of that principle are worth considering. Which is what we're all doing, dispensing with cliches about poor people consoling themselves with delusion.
The 3 major food groups - caffeine, nicotine, and ibuprofen - are the foundation of my life. I LIKE to lay around eating donuts, drinking coffee, and playing games damn it! Ignorance is bliss! I've always been prepared for when my doctor makes me go on a diet to loose weight; but, I figured the damage would be limited to the exercise. If my IQ soars to 50 all is lost!
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I don't believe that a fast metabolism is some kind of genetic accident either.
Unfortunately, you're wrong about that.
No doubt in the next century, they'll identify the genes that are responsible, and then everyone will want them.
The base pathways we have for processing food for energy are incredible invariant in terms of genetics. I think that your personal biochemistry is something that can be "trained" as much as any other physical attribute.
Since when is the human form infinitely plastic? Can you "train" a short person to be tall?
No doubt the way you live influences your metabolism. But some people have either slow or fast ones. Sucks, don't it?
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
Hmm...120 million in the upper 2 percent worldwide, and yet only 100,000 have joined. Seems like the vast majority of intelligent people on this planet have no connection with MENSA whatsoever.
The study's antagonist, Ms. Widdecombe (pronounced 'wide'-combe for sake of humor) states in the article,
"When I lost weight it was my waistline that improved, not my cerebellum."
I bet the french authors are having a blast with that one considering the cerebellum or 'little brain' has nothing to do with this kind of cognitive function. It's almost exclusively a motor center.
ôó
You might be interested to read the original research paper:
7 /1208
Relation between body mass index and cognitive function in healthy middle-aged men and women
M. Cournot, J. C. Marquié, D. Ansiau, C. Martinaud, H. Fonds, J. Ferrières, and J. B. Ruidavets
Neurology, Oct 2006; 67: 1208 - 1214.
http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/67/
(Free abstract; Full text or PDF for those who have subscription: your university/library/... computers might have full access)
(Why are submitters/slashdot crew not not doing the little effort to hunt down the original research papers for such stories?)
--
Frederik Questier
Incorrect. Wisdom is often thought of as experience, thus knowledge.
Intelligence is usually associated with a combination of knowledge and ability to think. One can be ignorant but intelligent, for example.
Being "smart" is almost always quick-wittedness independent of knowledge.
So, depending on the vague and shifting conditions, one can indeed be smart but not wise.
Wow. You really do have nothing better to do than constantly trolling /., do you? Why don't you get your Mensa brain to work and find a job?
Wow. You really do have nothing better to do than constantly trolling /., do you? Why don't you get your Mensa brain
Nah, I just like it when you trolls deny you are trolls, use an obfuscated "takes one to know one" approach to deny you're trolls, and prove you're trolls doing it. Makes it easier for moderators.
If I were the troll, I wouldn't say this: leave me alone, troll, never reply to my messages again, I do not want you to reply, stop.
But you won't, because you're a troll, and trolling is what you do. You'll tell me to leave the board, because thn you'd "win" your pathetic, empty lil' troll victory, but you're just an annoyance, like dog crap on the sidewalk. I could simply walk by, but I'm a decent guy, I helpfully point out to the world that there's a crap there so others won't walk in it.
You've proven you are a troll, others will know to mod you as such.
I think I've done enough to prove you live under a bridge, you'll do the rest when you reply despite this: on't reply to me.
You can't take the sky from me...
divide your BMI by 2 raised to your Erdos Number
NI = BMI / 2^e
if this is between 0.7 and 1, you are normal. if this is between 1 and 20, you spend waaaay too much time on slashdot. if this is higher than 20, you are Erdos. in any case you spend waaaay too much time on slashdot.
Being fat makes you stupid.
Being stupid makes you fat.
Being lazy makes you stupid and fat.
None of the above.
At the end of the day - you're stupid and fat.
I guess we can just keep doing this. I don't mind it. I do, however, wonder what you're trying to say. Because, frankly, you sound like a rambling fool.
Which may be your point.
I do realize, of course, that you're just baiting me ("leave me alone"? I've never seen a more pathetic attempt at reverse psychology than this). And I'm feeding you. But I must admit that I'm curious what you will come up with next.
leave me alone, troll, never reply to my messages again, I do not want you to reply, stop.
But you won't, because you're a troll, and trolling is what you do.
You can't take the sky from me...
this one was really weak. try not repeating yourself so much. it's boring.
Leave me alone, troll, never reply to my messages again, I do not want you to reply, stop.
But you won't, because you're a troll, and trolling is what you do.
You can't take the sky from me...
this one was really weak. try not repeating yourself so much. it's boring.
try not repeating yourself so much. it's boring.
practise what you preach, and don't reply to me troll.
At least you make me feel superior, having losers like you around really puts life in perspective.
You can't take the sky from me...
Yeah, I had a feeling that you needed external affirmation. You don't seem very secure.
This brings me back to the halcyon days of alt.flame, before The Great AOL Invasion of '94.
Please forgive me for interrupting you two. Do continue - your Mensan mating dance fairly crackles with homoerotic tension!