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Causes of Death Linked To Weight
An anonymous reader writes to mention that while a couple of years ago researchers found that overweight people have a lower death rate than people with a normal weight, it may be more complicated than that. "Now, investigating further, they found out which diseases are more likely to lead to death in each weight group. Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights, they report that overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease."
I'm not pigging out. I'm defending against Alzheimers and Parkinsons.
Brilliant!
Start a happiness pandemic
But it doesn't explain why all the /really/ old people you see are skinny. You won't find an overweight 90-year-old.
Let's break it down.
Smokers eat less. Smokers die of cancer. Cancer kills more people than obesity.
Wow.
Diseases that cause people to forget to eat, or be unable to eat, don't kill overweight people?
Of course not.
They kill starved people.
So, less than 100%?
"Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them."
-James Watson
The whole study is a joke because it assumes that body mass index is a valid measure of obesity, and it isn't. The only real way to tell how fat you are is to measure your body fat percentage, usually with calipers although some new scales claim to be able to do it electrically.
I lift weights, and I'm at the higher side of the BMI because I've got a bit more muscle mass. Yet, according to that study, I'd be "fat". And I'm not even particularly big. If you got a man who was lifting since their teens into middle age, he could easily have 20 - 40 pounds more muscle than the average joe.
It's wrong to teach BMI in schools. It's wrong to use it as a measure. If you want to know fat, break out the calipers. Anything less, is wrong, and anything based on it, is absurd.
This is my sig.
In 2005: "Obesity Threatens to Cut U.S. Life Expectancy, New Analysis Suggests"
http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/mar2005/nia-16.htm
Besides, being underweight, I don't buy into it anyway.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
that it is best to be somewhat overweight when you are elderly, that this weight class had the lowest levels of mortality. that when you are old, being thin is a greater danger than being somewhat overweight, for all of the risk factors mentioned above in the story summary
however, at all other times in your life, being any kind of overweight begins the inevitable accumulation of damage due to extra fats in the system, extra sugars, extra inflammatory agents, etc.
so i think the best idea would be to remain thin throughout your life until old age. then, rack on the pounds (but not TOO many pounds: being grossly overweight is bad at any age)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
those of us who were taught maladies such as high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease could be linked to obesity were just plain wrong? Great, I'm going to Jack In The Box to order a couple Sirloin burgers, large fries and giant coke! Then, I'll have a box of delicious Oreo Cakesters for desert. And I don't want to forget to cancel my useless gym membership, either. Thank you, science!
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
A Chinese colleague of mine once remarked that my buddha belly would mark me as a lucky person in China.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
People on chemotherapy lose weight. Sick people tend to eat less than healthy people. Just because A and B are correlated, it doesn't mean that A causes B. B could cause A or they could share a common cause. (I.e., you give one possible explanation, or an explanation for one part of the trend, but there are a whole bunch that readily spring to my mind.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Personally, with my current health state, I don't want to live forever. And yes, I live in what most believe to be the most technologically advanced society on the planet, however, medical technology ain't cheap. What good is top-notch health care if you can't afford it?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
...they found out which diseases are more likely to lead to death in each weight group. Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights...
That's great, but there's still that whole 'death' thing.
Wake me up when they work that one out. If I'm alive.
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
I can't tell from the article - but is this because the fat people die sooner due to weight related problems and thus those diseases don't affect them as much, or is it just at that fat people don't plain die as much as skinny people?
Clearly, NOBODY EVER thought to try to control for other health factors in the study.
Obviously, you, and only you, have noticed this awful, systematic flaw in this study that obviously didn't have to pass an kind of rigorous review process to get published in JAMA.
Praise be, we've found a new Einstein!
I'm a fat smoker. You insensitive clod!
"Whenever you meet fat hookers, you feel bad, because you know they're going to eat you."
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Recent studies show that a persons weight or BMI are terrible indicators of their overall health. The best method available (without special equipment) is the ratio of waist size to height.
If your waist circumference is less than 50% of your height, you are at a low risk for fat-related diseases. If it is more than 50%, get to the gym, stat!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
They'd be envious of your diet. You don't get fat eating boiled cabbage and rich three times a day.
Just a thought: According to the graph in the first link, underweight people have a greater chance than overweight people of dying of lung diseases and coronary heart disease. However, smoking, a major causative factor in both groups of diseases, also suppresses the appetite and causes people who would normally be normal or overweight to become underweight. Thus, underweight people might be more likely to die from lung disease and heart disease, but this may just be becaquse underweight people are more likely to smoke.
So, even if smoking isn't actually a major factor int he result, one has to look at the lifestyles that each weight group is likely to lead in order to determine what the important relationships are. Causations are what's important, not correlations.
Low weight is a symptom seen in many people with diseases that will kill them: Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancers ... and the loss of weight happens after the disease is well under way. It's a common symptom, not the cause or even contributing factor.
The chart compares the number of "Excess" deaths. So I guess this really just means that us fat people are less likely to die more than once.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
What's right for one person is not right for another? Is milk good for you? I bet if you search for that you'll find research going both ways... We're all... Snowflakes... There was a guy in New York who lived to be over 100 living on Thunderbird Wine and Bread fried in fat back. When asked why he doesn't fry his bread in bacon he said because it was too lean. Here was a guy who knew exactly what his body needed and lived to be a ripe old age. If he'd of gone to a doctor they'd of told him to eat some vegetables and he'd of been dead in a week...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
In Shanghai at least (the only bit of China I've seen) there don't seem to be many fat people. Most workplaces have cafeterias. I ate in one once and the food consisted mainly of cabbage and minced pork. They also mostly ride bicycles. When they can all afford cars and more food, watch the obesity epidemic begin! ...right after the asthma and lung disease.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
If they weighed a person suffering from lukemia - by the time the disease had devastated the body - they wouldn't be fat anymore! Therefore... skinny people die young! Stupid.
Why is there a category missing completely? They've got underweight, overweight and obese. Where's the "target weight" category?
More
"And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease." So, in other words, overweight people are *not* less likely to die than underweight people. They just have an inexplicably lower death rate?
A Chinese colleague of mine once remarked that my buddha belly would mark me as a lucky person in China
Maybe in China, but I found out when I put on a huge gut from taking Paxil and drinking beer that in America, you never get lucky with a big gut. Now that I'm off the Paxil I lost all the weight I gained... Oh hell I still don't get lucky very often. But with the Bhudda Belly I never got lucky.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Talk about adding "weight" to the "body of evidence". This ought to be a meaty topic to chew on.
What's next? Scientists discover an inverse relationship between resistance to being struck by lighting the more body hair the would-be struckee has?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I for one welcome our Pizza eating Overlords.
As can opponents, such as I. I view this a another excuse to be a Telle-Tubby wanna be. Personally, I'd rather die young and skinny than fat and old, unable to do jack sh*t in my golden years because I can't move my arse.
I suggest another study on this study, studying the effects of this study's results causing the Great Twinkie Shortage of 2007...
Enlightenment is a pipe dream. So where's the pipe?
I don't know about you, but when I'm "in the pink and getting a good amount of exercise" I feel friggin FANTASTIC. Now I have a medical study that documents sex being good for me, thus I support this research wholeheartedly.
My grandmother told me when she was 95 years old "I don't know why people want to live to be a hundred. It ain't no fun bein' old!"
She died in 2003 just short of her hundredth birthday.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Can we apply this same team to study why fat women are always having daughters.. :*(
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Especially if you make "Speak your Weight" machines.
"You weigh 330 pounds and will die when your heart explodes next Thursday at 3pm".
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
As others have pointed out, BMI is an excellent shorthand for the average person. All you really need to do is recognize that there are plenty of individual variations that you need to think about. Well, duh.
But to add to your comment, I believe a further limitation of the BMI is that people of appropriate weight often have an unhealthy amount of fat nevertheless. The reason is probably because modern humans normally achieve a lower weight by eating less, but not by eating better, or by more exercise. So there are plenty of girls out there who are skinny, "normal" BMI, but are also 35% fat by weight, which is not healthy.
I saw an interesting Nova show the other day about 12 total couch potatoes training for the Boston Marathon. At the beginning they all got a very complete sports physical, which involved a lot more careful measurement of their general fitness than any of us ever gets, fancy MRIs and treadmill tests and all. (Got to avoid someone dying on the show and letting WGBH in for some hideous lawsuit.) What they found, somewhat to their surprise, was that a lot of people were of "normal" BMI but had unhealthily high fat percentages and terrible cardiovascular fitness. Others were actually technically overweight, but for random reasons (probably mostly genetics) had decent cardiovascular fitness and not all that much fat. The bottom line is that knowing your true individual level of fitness can only begin with the BMI.
Even fat percentage has its limitations. I hear that what kind of fat you have matters a lot. Men don't want the kind of fat that adds to your belly, because it's more associated with CAD (coronary artery disease, the precursor to the heart attack). I hear girls should prefer fat that adds to their ass or cottage cheeses their thighs, rather than gives them big tits, which seems a bit heartless of Mother Nature.
This seems rather odd to me since I've recently seen a study from the UK, and one from Canada correlating an increased risk of cancer with increased weight.
I haven't been able to find the link for the study in Canada, but here is the British: http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2007/11/07/uk-cancerstudy.html
Obesity causes heart disease and cancer. Heart disease kills more people in America than all forms of cancer combined. People who die of diseases other than heart disease tend to waste away to nothing, then die. Those who die of a heart attack die instantly while they're still fat. If you click the link and read the chart, you'll see they saw "benefit" in being overweight, not obese.
Next, they'll do a study on weight fluctuation. Thanks to wasting due to illness, they'll find the obvious; Those who loose a lot of weight tend to die more often. You'll no doubt see that as an indication to stay on the sofa, stuffing your face with pork rinds.
overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases...
Now is this a Super Grab Bag or the Fun Size? Just making sure I get the right medicine!
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
You may be "informative" but you're also wrong, unless you're using some fancy definition of "more" like including all the people that never see a car.
Cars are EXTREMELY dangerous, and that we let all of us idiots drive such powerful death machines with such little regulation is frightening.
If you want some pseudomath - the insurance company premiums are directly related to their costs, at least if you assume a semicompetitive market. Housing insurance is annually lower than car insurance - even with extremely inexpensive car insurance - everywhere I've seen. And that's for cars costing substantially LESS than the house...
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Maybe I am a rube, but don't all people or groups of people have the same death rate? 100%?
Nope. It's not missing; RTFA. These are *excess* deaths, over and above normal. In other words, the numbers for "normal" weights is 0, in all cases.
I don't think it's that putting on weight when you're very old keeps you healthy. It's more that if you are keeping the weight when you're old then you're probably healthy.
Generally when you get very old a lot of stuff stops working well, including your digestion, your kidneys, liver, and so forth. That makes it harder for you to extract what you need from your diet and keep your weight up. Your thyroid and testosterone start slacking off, too, which depresses your energy level and causes your muscles to start wasting away. Finally, if you've got a cancer that will, for unknown reasons, generally cause you to lose weight. (Most men over 85 have a slow-growing prostate cancer, for example.)
So I suspect in this case weight is just a proxy for general good health. It's sort of like how a low heart rate is a proxy for general good health when you're young, but it would be nuts to take steps (like consuming barbiturates) to deliberate slow the heart rate in the mistaken notion that this causes good health.
One problem here might be that the researches looked at people who survived gaining x-pounds as though they had always weighed x-pounds. Between my twenties and forties I gained about forty pounds. I had a heart attack due to the imbalance between my "good" cholesterol and my "bad" cholesterol. I would not have had the heart attack if I had eaten low-fat foods and exercised regularly. a good diet and exercise program would also keep me from being obese as a side effect.
Looking at people who are obese as if they were born that way is wrong. For example, if someone can survive gaining enough weight to make them obese then they do not have, for one thing, a genetic predisposition towards a cholesterol imbalance.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
TFA does mention a decrease in lung ailments for the overweight.
While I agree that this study accounted for smoking, I consistently find they don't account for nearly enough things. If you have the original scientific article, can you tell me whether they accounted for people who have a history of actively dieting?
In the US, at least, we allow diet products made with an incredible array of extremely unhealthy crap in the name of having fewer calories and lower fat... including allowing artificial sweeteners that are illegal in places like Canada. I would EASILY believe, in a heartbeat, that people who eat nutitiously but end up overweight are much, much healthier than people who fill themselves with "light" food in the name of weight avoidance.
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for gender or age. How can the same weight be ideal for an 18 year old guy and a 45 year old woman, just because they are the same height?
If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome.
Yes, of course. My family line are all a bunch of meat eating farmers who were tall and lived to old age. You really believe all that crap?
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HillaryCare will fix this.
The reason fat people don't die of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, infections and lung disease is because they don't live long enough. They are already dead from cancer, diabetes or heart disease.
So, can I look up what I will die from by my weight?
That's got cause & effect backwards: People with diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer, infections and lung disease tend to lose weight and, if they are fat when they get ill, they are likely underweight by the time they are cured (or dead).
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
The implication in all these kinds of stories is "If you don't die from fill-in-the-blank disease, then you will never die." Of course, the real case is you will die from something else.
If I have to choose, I choose to die from being a lazy, gluttonous pig. If you are working hard to not be a lazy gluttonous pig, guess what? You'll die too. At least I had fun.
You have to be almost emaciated before you are considered "underweight". I have a couple friend that are fine by the BMI scale, but their doctors are very concerned about their lack of weight. The BMI scale is extremely biased to the "thin is good" idea. Well, that's not the case. While being overweight is bad, being underweight is way worse. Now granted in America thanks to the abundance we enjoy, being underweight isn't a problem for many people, however that doesn't excuse having a bad system.
The BMI system is more or less just scare mongering BS. "OMG everyone is overweight! National crisis!"
I also worry that it encourages even more anorexia in young women. We've long had a problem especially in the west, with young (and even older) women feeling a press to be thinner than is healthy, and taking some extremely unhealthy means to reach it. Well, BMI helps to justify this crap. You get some girl who's 5'10" who starves herself to weigh 130 pounds but thinks it's fine because she's still in the "normal" range, and could even go lower, I mean you want to be at the light end of normal right? This despite the fact that she's skin and bones and extremely unhealthy.
The article title implies that obesity is somehow healthy. The only real signifiance of the data is that obese and underweight people are more unhealthy than overweight and normal weight people. BTW, what the fuck, it doesn't show any of the data for normal weight people.
Lets not forget about the numerous studies linking diets high in fat (well, certain kinds of fat), grilled meat, and processed meat to numerous cancers of the digestive system.
The simple fact that cannot be disproven is that, the moderate intake of a variety of foods, with a heavy ephasis on complex-carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables, and with adequate fat intake (think olive-oil and fish) will improve the quality of your life, and very possibly lengthen (baring genetics) your life.
There are some people, like my grandmother, that can smoke, drink, and eat whatever the hell they want, and live to be 85. Most people fall into the category of my grandfather, where this sort of diet(high-fat), and smoking will give you a heart attack between 50-60. I look at my dad, who unintentionally eats healthy, avoids alcohol, and excersizes regularly. He is 55 and could pass for being in his mid 40s.
I've pretty much read every comment on this thread and am impressed by the fat hatred amongst nerds. I could spend all afternoon trying to correct the incorrect information people have posted so far with respect to current obesity research, but instead I'd like to propose a different question:
Why is increasing life expectancy a moral imperative?
Is living fast (or fat or smoking or sexually active) and dying young a valid life choice? If it's valid for a person, why not for a society?
If the claim is that dying young costs society more, just remember, death costs money and we're all going to die. From a monetary standpoint, the best thing that can happen is that we get hit by a truck the day we retire.
Surely you're not suggesting that funding can change the results of studies?!?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Poppycock and balderdash. There's no such thing as a lower death rate. We all die sometime so the death rate is always 100%.
Its surprising how the author(s) and contributors to this article include professors but all seem to understand suprisingly little about logic because it impossibly deduces from the causes of death only that overweight people live longer than skinny people.
The only way you could discover that is to consider the AGE at death against BMI, not CAUSE of death against BMI.
All that can actually be deduced from the stats is that as a group, fatties are more likely to die of the same things, which is already quite intuitive anyway.
Overweight people have a much lower incidence of sexually transmitted diseases!
So much for the old expression, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die."
Can I have fries with that?
I've tried a few electrical appliances, and all the stuff sold to the consumers seems to be just pure crap.
I went to get tested by pro equipment a while ago, namely, Inbody 720, and the results were so close to what I could imagine to be true from other hints (weight/height/exercise/waist circumference/way I eat/way I look in the mirror) that I was actually positively surprised how well it seemed to correlate w/what I expected to be my situation. That same day I bought a scale that promised to do the same measurements, tried it, and took it right back to the store, because it was way off. I once had one other electrical body fat measuring tool that you'd hold in your hands, and it was obviously just as bad as the scale, clearly giving wrong values when you tried it on different people.
So, personally, I keep a log of my weight and waist circumference by feeding them on to a php page that dumps them into mysql db, and then draw graphs from the data via gnuplot. And will in the future also go to that Inbody 720 measurement thing every 3 to 6 months.
Also, your waist circumference appears to give a very good approximation regarding the amount of visceral fat, which correlates very well w/health risks regarding being obese. I'd guess that the rule of thumb that was mentioned in another post to this topic was really good - make your waist circumference less than 50% of your height.
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne
I believe in 2004 I read about a large longitudinal study that looked at the life expectancy of healthy people and found that less fat was healthier, even at the bottom end; i.e. no J-curve for healthy people. But I can't for the life of me remember the name of the study. And anyway I've gotta go lose some weight!
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
The article notes underweight, not "normal" by BMI. Perhaps you mean normal by the "media" standards?
It's not a controlled study. It's a correlation study. We need to be careful about mixing up the idea of controlling for a factor in an experimental design, and controlling for a factor in a correlation or meta study. In the latter case, it's important if you want to come up with interesting correlations, but I doubt you can ever be that sure you've really disaggregated the confounding data.
For example, note the huge fraction of reduced deaths among the overweight that is attributed to lung and respiratory illnesses. Now if they've successfully removed smokers from this analysis, it's a verrry interesting correlation. It might mean there is some mechanism heretofore unknown by which body fat protects against lung cancer and acute respiratory infections.
On the other hand, it isn't entirely unreasonable to suppose it's possible they might have mixed in a few smokers into their non-smoking overweight group. Smoking has a huge impact on both body weight and respiratory disease, and failing mixing up smoking with body weight would be expected to produce something very like we're looking at here. Isn't it possible their datasets, which rely on self-reporting, under-represent the rate of smoking? I bet the life insurance company datasets under-represent smoking, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true for the NHANES data too. When Mr. Government worker asks, could enough smokers be untruthful with him to skew the results?
If your life depended on getting the answer right, which hypothesis would you choose: an unknown mechanism that protects fat people from lung cancer, or a failure of a self-report data set to count all the smokers?
I'm not saying this is a bad study. It is probably a good one. But these kinds of studies aren't supposed to give you answers; they're supposed to raise productive questions. Anybody who uses this kind of mainstream news outlet report of statistical or meta studies to guide his personal health choices is a fool.
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Don't go underwater cave diving at home.
How can you complain when you can get 2000 calories for $6?
I wonder how much constantly being reminded that you're going to die contributes to your death?
I mean does anybody even have a link to the actual study in the JAMA? The New York Times is not qualified to do write ups on health studies. Nobody over there is even remotely qualified.
In the last year I've lost a lot of weight. Over 165 pounds of fat gone with more to go. During my study of weight loss I recall reading that the difference in body fat between men and women could actually explain the observed mortality rates. I haven't seen an actual study of it so I have to defer judgment, but it was said that having extra body fat increased the chances of surviving through the worst of some diseases. The quote in the summary is worded to indicate that people didn't necessarily have a lower incidence of these diseases, they just had less chance of dying as a result. (I'd check the article but it wants a login)
And in response to the poster mentioning that sedentary overweight people are likely to stay home and therefore less likely to die in a serious accident. Keep in mind, in addition to the greater likelihood of an accident happening in the home, people who are obese have dramatically increased chances of serious injury or death in car accidents compared to those of normal body mass.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2093.html
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
So then why did the Weighted Companion cube have to die he had a full long life ahead of him.
Excuse me, but the rate of death is exactly the same for thin people as for obese people... it's 100%. I have yet to find a diet that lets you live forever.
Now, if they'd said "life expectancy" and used actual years as a reference unit, I might buy it.
"Correlation does not necessarily mean causation." There are so many confounding factors here it's not funny.
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
It's true that obesity kills, but there are 4 categories the article identifies
1. underweight
2. at weight
3. overweight
4. obese
The article seems to indicate that the best categories to be in are 2 or 3, which shouldn't be that surprising. Being obese is horrible for your health, but there is a fairly wide range of weight around normal weight which remains healthy.
One thing that the article makes clear is that being *underweight* is pretty bad for you, and has much more problems associated with it than being overweight (but not obese). Again, this shouldn't be surprising. Being overweight just means that you are carrying around some excess fat, but is not an indication of malnutrition. Being underweight means that your body is nutrition deprived enough that it hasn't been able to build up a fat store. It also means, that since you don't have a significant fat store, your body starts to cannibalize muscle tissue whenever you go for a while without eating.
In general, good nutrition is the key thing. Either overeating *or* dieting when you don't need to will damage your body and lower your life span. Remember, also you need some fat on your body for doing things like cushioning your heart, and for when you go a while without eating anything nutritious, which many people do without realizing it.
Then how the hell do they explain this, this, this, and this? For those of you too lazy to look, the first and fourth have to do with how starving slows down your body, resulting in you living longer because your body doesn't wear itself out as quickly. The second has to do with starving reduces your changes of getting Parkinson's Disease. The third has to do with starving delays Huntington's Disease. And by "starving," they mean being hungry, not killing yourself by being anorexic.
I'd like to see the robustness analysis of this metric. 18.5 to 25 is "normal" and 25 to 30 is "over weight." But according to this random link, in 1960 the US average was 25, and in 2002 it was 28. So, "overweight" is +/-3 from average, while "normal" is -3 to -9.5. Shouldn't we expect the average people to be the healthiest?
The correct measure is almost certainly deviation from average.
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It's no wonder people are confused when widely publicized studies give contradictory advice, especially when they come out only a week apart. I can't wait to see the doubletalk from medical advice sites as they try to reconcile these conflicting results.
The article conclude that low body weight causes death. What the study really shows is that impending death is correlated with (and indeed causes, via various mechanisms) low body weight/BMI.
When people become ill and die of certain diseases (Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, infections, lung disease, etc.) they lose their appetite and/or ability to eat and consequently lose weight .
A person's weight at death will tend to be below average, especially if they were of average weight to begin with. If they were overweight before they became ill, they will most likely still be overweight at death, but less so. In summary the distribution of a population's weight at death is shifted left (to lower values) from a distribution of the same population's weight while alive.
The correct interpretation is "dying people lose weight." This isn't news but the misinterpretation of it is news.
The study is misleading because it does not take age into account. Obesity took off around 1950-1960, so in the average, the overweight and obese are in their fities while the underweight and normal are in their seventies in average, and that's about when age related diseases kick in. Studies such as these are a disaster and the whole medical field has to step up! See also: http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2007/11/06/andy-grove-takes-on-drug-development
Time to call Pizza Hut. :-D
Property is theft.
...increase gravity.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
... is 100%.
Death rate refers to the percentage of people in the sample who died in a given period of time - the rate of death (i.e. the number of deaths per year per 100,000 people). You *can* of course lower this number by different treatments and behaviors.
However, I share your utter contempt for articles that describe reductions in death rate from disease x due to treatment or behavior y because these same articles almost never give the context in terms of the overall death rate (or expected lifespan which can be calculated from death rates). A 30% reduction in deaths from heart attacks in patients treated with drug x is not so impressive if there is no overall decrease in death rate. The overall death rate is also by far the more accurate number (larger sample size and whereas you can never be 100% sure whether someone died of a heart attack, you *can* be 100% certain that he died...). This actually happened with the very first large scale study on the effects of lowering cholesterol using drugs where there was a significant decrease in heart attacks but a slight increase in overall mortality. Similar questions can be raised about estrogen and breast cancer (death rates are offset by lower incidences of ovarian cancer). When you give the overall numbers, then one can judge whether an extra 1-2 years life expectancy is worth giving up a pack a day smokes or that bowl of Hagen-Daaz, or driving that Porsche.
Unfortunately, this type of adult discussion seems impossible, especially in the US there is a thinly hidden Puritanism mixed with the idea that everything can be conquered by effort and good intentions - including death.
...unless you change weight groups before dying. Which makes me wonder. Given that we tend to loose weight in our old age, is the number off-put by people dying simply of old age being not-fat? Really. Look at the 70-year-old population and tell me they are, on average, as heavy as the 40-year-old population.
If we take this to the extreme, the fat people live longer and the skinny people die sooner. Over time, the skinny people will die out, and the human race will have evolved into disgusting blobs. What is really scary is that it would seem that humans were intended to evolve that way...
Or the study's conclusion could just be wrong.
and this time one with no reading comprehension skills and love of hearing himself talk.
I understand it's not a controlled study. I never said it was. Were you aware that it's actually possible to use a magical thing called statistics to help with analysis of data such that you could actually remove confounding factors as part of the analysis?
Go back to reading your scifi and fantasy books.
I thought every group of people were subjected to a 100 percent death rate!
So, fat people are living forever now?
a couple of years ago researchers found that overweight people have a lower death rate than people with a normal weight
Incredible. I thought it was a steady 100% for everybody.
from what i remember it came out with the absurd conclusion because they included the sick as "thin"....as happens when you are dying.
As with any study, it is the bad conclusion of an otherwise sound study that is flawed. This is a sad attempt by a bunch of nerds on /. to rationalize being fat. And in true slashdot fashion, it is a poorly worded summary as well. Don't we all have the same death rate since we all die eventually? I would say the human death rate, regardless of body weight, is 100%.
did overweight people figure out how to get their death rate under 100%?
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
Causes of Weight Loss Linked to Death
You're insane.
5'2" @ 165-185 pounds is my ideal mate. Admittedly, I like my women soft, but still. You need to take a look at the weight chart available at http://www.cockeyed.com/photos/bodies/heightweight.shtml
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It could be that they're not living long enough to develop Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. In my part of the country, most of the elderly above 70 are not obese.