Slashdot Mirror
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
Let's break it down.
Smokers eat less. Smokers die of cancer. Cancer kills more people than obesity.
Wow.
So, less than 100%?
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)
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
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.
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
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!
But it doesn't explain why all the /really/ old people you see are skinny. You won't find an overweight 90-year-old.
You haven't met my grandmother. She's getting there.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I'm a fat smoker. You insensitive clod!
Just remember that the average height in the Western world has gone up significantly in the last century due to better nutrition. A lot of the really old people who are really short also didn't get the best quality, variety, or quantity of food when they were growing up, which is a contributing factor to their shortness.
I bet you the average height of men 80 or older has gone up at least 3 inches in the last 30-40 years. By the time you'd be 80, who knows where it will be?
Start a happiness pandemic
"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.
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
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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.
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...
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
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?
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
So, can I look up what I will die from by my weight?
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I wonder how much constantly being reminded that you're going to die contributes to your death?
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.