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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."
Let's break it down.
Smokers eat less. Smokers die of cancer. Cancer kills more people than obesity.
Wow.
The /really/ old people, in addition to being skinny, are usually also short.
At 6'4" I take this personally as a bad sign.
On the other hand, there's some guy who's trying to achieve longevity through calorie restriction. Only problem is that he's cut his diet back so far that he doesn't have the energy to enjoy normal activities. He may live a long time, but he won't have much fun doing so. I'd like to live as long as I can live well, and so far in my 50's I can do all of the things I enjoy.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
"And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease."
Hmm, what about accidents? It seems like extremely overweight people tend to spend more time at home which probably lowers their risks from car / skydiving / whatever accidents. My guess is the low weight stay at home people probably live longer than fat stay at home people. Wonder if I could get a grant to study this...
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!
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BMI combined with a shred of common sense is a perfectly fine approximation of obesity. There are two Unix admins here with scary-high BMIs, and you don't need calipers to know which one is obese and which one is just on steroids.
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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.
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...
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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
the japanese are pretty long-lived, and tend to be pretty small. i heard life expectancy for the japanese drops when they adopt western eating habits (mostly consuming milk) which causes them to grow larger in addition to the fact that the western diet is nutritionally deficient relative to the tradition japanese one. also incidences of all prime causes of early mortality increase: heart disease, etc.
also, women across all societies live longer than men. i think that while women tend to be smaller overall (than men), they tend to have higher BMIs, correct - in the sense that women carry more fat than men in general.
i also read somewhere - and never was able to find it again - that death rates decreased in general the closer one's body mass got to 55kg. man, if i can find that link i'll post it.
when i was a kid, i was undersized for a while - and there was an old lady who lived next door who saw me frustrated about not being big enough to ride the bike i'd gotten. i told her my frustration about being small and she said, "look at hte bright side. if you're small, you'll probably live a long time." Apparently there is some anecdote about living longer if you are smaller.
not that anecdotal evidence means anything, but the japanese population is not an insignificant sample size. interestingly enough, on a biological level longevity is inversely associated with fertility (another factoid i read somehweree that i cannot substantiate at all - no flames please) - and the japanese have one of the lowest birth rates in the first world.
again, no flames as i cannot substantiate these assertions and don't have the time to. But the japanese thing and the woman thing are pretty much documented as regards longevity.
un burrito me trampeó.
But, you need to be very muscular for it to tag you as obese.
Obese isn't really a problem; but it might be overly affecting the overweight spread, which is the grouping that seems to faring the best in this report.
What if overweight started at 27 BMI instead of 25 BMI?
You won't find an overweight 90-year-old.
... but if you happen to have won the genetic lottery you can pig out and live to a hundred.
... I guess that's why they managed to become oldsters.
Sure you will. Susceptibility to various diseases is an artifact of diet, genetics and overall lifestyle. Some people's bodies can withstand decades-long biochemical assaults (unhealthy food, smoking, alcohol, illicit drugs, etc.) with little or no ill effect, whereas others suffer horribly and die early. It's a crapshoot, any way you look at it. Take a walk around your average nursing home or assisted-living center. Plenty of the residents are in the 80-90 age group and are, well, "plump" is probably too kind a word. Not many, by any means
Of course, to be fair now, a lot of elderly people (who after all, grew up in a different era) aren't attracted to what Dr. Joel Fuhrman calls the Mainstream American Diet. They didn't grow up in an era of culinary gluttony, and regular intake of large quantities of animal protein wasn't as common. In any event, I'd say a lot of the oldsters I know just have better dietary habits
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It's also a measure of number of people your house interacts with compared with your car. Insurance on places business costs a lot more than home insurance for two reasons: 1. Most people who visit someone's home are friends, and for the most part people don't sue their friends. 2. The number of random strangers who interact with your home on a daily basis is fairly limited.
Put another way, I guarantee you that house insurance would cost every bit as much as automobile insurance if everyone drove their houses to work instead of their cars even if those houses did not drive very fast. :-D
But seriously.... For what it's worth, car insurance isn't always more expensive. It depends a lot on where you live, on how well you drive, on the age of your car, etc. My annual car insurance (multiple safe driver discounts, multi-line policy discounts, etc.) on my 1999 Ford Windstar costs about a fifth what my annual earthquake insurance costs, and that's not even counting the homeowner's policy itself, which costs about about twice as much as my annual car insurance. Even the insurance on my new Toyota Rav4 comes in less than my homeowner's insurance. If you're seeing the opposite, I'd say either your homeowner's insurance is spectacularly cheap or your car insurance is spectacularly overpriced. :-)
As an aside, when I got the Rav4, I decided to price shop with other insurance companies to see if my 1999 Windstar could be insured for less with those so-called discount auto insurance companies.... The cheapest cane in at almost double what I'm paying State Farm for identical (and sometimes lesser) coverage. I checked with about four of those companies and I couldn't believe how bad their rates were by comparison. Check out State Farm. There are real advantages to an insurance company being a mutual organization (effectively a non-profit) instead of a for-profit public corporation. Some years, they actually give us money back when they find that accident rates were lower than expected. When's the last time your insurance company said, "You know, we've decided to lower your rate retroactively for the last six months"? :-) If you aren't using a mutual insurance company, you are probably paying too much. Just my $0.02.
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The Japanese are also statistically more resistant to lung cancer if they smoke. I think there is more to their longevity then just diet.
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Here is something people don't understand about overweight people. When they look at someone who is over weight, they imagine that size with with their abilities. The thing is, over weight people are built and in the same condition as you might be if you carried around 50 pounds of weight every day.
People goto the gym to work out with weights to get the benifit of carrying around weight. When a person is over weight but not to a point that they cannot do anything (I'm 325 pounds and can keep up with most anyone in almost anything I do), they are actually really fit under all that fat and in some cases more fit then a proper weight person who doesn't work out. Imagine lumping 125 pounds around every day, all day with anything you do. Now imagine taking all that weight off and looking to see how fit or more fit you would be. Now stop imagining it is your skinny ass carrying all this weight and think about the fat person who cannot take it all off but would be in the same position for the most part if they could.
People who are over weight get sort of a workout and aren't in bad health by default. It is the grossly overweight people who cannot move and do things that because they don't remain active who aren't as fit. As a 6ft 4 inch 325+ pound male who can walk 5 miles through the woods carrying another 25-50 pounds of gear with me without breathing hard or getting tired, I am pretty fit for not working out or training to do so. I can lift over 400lbs and I don't weight train or anything. It is all because I am pushing an extra 150 pounds with me minute of every day.
Every study I have ever seen which compares being too thin to being too fat indicates that your overall health risks are massively higher if you are 5% below recommended weight than if you are 5% over. As a general rule, they all indicate that you are better being overweight (but not obese) than underweight.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The other proposal that seems to fall out of these stats is that the proper 'healthy' weight appears to be higher than what's being suggested right now.
I'm willing to bet that the 'correct' weights were promulgated based upon an (incredibly unscientific) eyeballing of what looked good ... If you had a nice, esthetic, flat body and no 'spare' fat anywhere, then you were declared 'healthy'. I don't remember hearing any stories anywhere about studies that led to the determination of what was the 'correct' weight for people, so this seems like a reasonable expectation).
It's incredible what we'll accept as truth based on some authoritative-looking yahoo's say-so.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
The BMI thing is so screwed up. And doctors who swear by it are also wrong. I am 5'-9" tall. I was told that i should weigh 150 lbs. At 175 lbs my face was basically a skull, you could see my spine from the front, all my bones were clearly visible, and I was passing out and I didn't k now why. I had a bunch of tests done. My doctor (reading my test results) told me that I was still over weight and that I needed to lose weight until I was 148-153 lbs. Another doctor came into the room with a copy of my test results. She said that I needed to go out and eat right away. My body was feeding on itself and that was the reason why I was passing out. Then she smacked my doctor in the head and told him to open his eyes. Look at the kid (I was 17 at the time) he is not overweight. Then they argued about what a person should weigh at certain heights. Yes I did switch doctors.