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Being Slightly Overweight May Lead To Longer Life
Hugh Pickens writes "Findings of a new study show that underweight people and those who are extremely obese die earlier than people of normal weight — but those who are only a little overweight actually live longer than people of normal weight. 'It's not surprising that extreme underweight and extreme obesity increase the risk of dying, but it is surprising that carrying a little extra weight may give people a longevity advantage,' said one of the coauthors of the study. 'It may be that a few extra pounds actually protect older people as their health declines, but that doesn't mean that people in the normal weight range should try to put on a few pounds.' The study examined the relationship between body mass index and death among 11,326 adults in Canada over a 12-year period. The study showed that underweight people were 70 percent more likely than people of normal weight to die, and extremely obese people were 36 percent more likely to die. But overweight individuals defined as a body mass index of 25 to 29.9 were 17 percent less likely to die than people of a normal weight defined as a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9. The relative risk for obese people was nearly the same as for people of normal weight. The authors controlled for factors such as age, sex, physical activity, and smoking. 'Overweight may not be the problem we thought it was,' said Dr. David H. Feeny, a senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research. 'Overweight was protective.'"
Wow, that makes me feel better about the batch of chocolate cheese I whipped up this weekend and the fact that later in the week, I'm going to experiment with substituting it for ganache in a chocolate truffle recipe.
Of course, the study took place in Canada. Skinny, underweight people dying faster in the cold of Canada just seems like a no brainer. I'd like to see the study replicated in the tropics to see if the numbers stand up somewhere that extra insulation doesn't help as much.
Based on the study, I need to lose 24 more pounds to get my BMI into the 25-29.9 range that had the highest longevity and I'm currently in the same longevity range as normal weight people. Woo hoo.
Start a happiness pandemic
Someone with a high BMI might be overweight - or they might be in really good shape and have lots of muscle. Just something to think about.
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Or it could be that people of normal weight were more inclined to be involved in activities that required you to get off your ass. I bet you're more likely to die if you leave your computer chair. As long as you had food, water, and pr0n you could live forever on your computer chair.
Then let me ask this. If slightly overweight seems to be healthy, then how was the "ideal" weight range determined?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
BMI doesn't take into account fat vs muscle. It's also pretty hard to be in the obese range of BMI with a low bodyfat percentage (possible, I'm sure, but very difficult without drugs). Perhaps the effect they're actually seeing is a few well-built people throwing the average off for the overweight range.
Not a typewriter
Sounds to me like the definition of "over-weight" is based on appearance instead of health.
More calories or less?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction
Now I have an excuse to not lose those "extra pounds" my wife has been complaining about!
Possible explanation,
There are three kind of people, normal eaters, under eaters and over eaters. Left unchecked, the first will become dangerously underweight, the second will remain normal, the third will become obese. Being slightly overweight may mean that one has a tendency to over eat but is concerned enough with one's health that one overcomes it. Therefore, the slightly overweight people are just health-conscious would be obese.
\u262D = \u5350
Depends on whether they factor in types of death, are 'ideal' weight people more likely to die while doing extreme sports?
I'm always ahead. Been doing that for years.
bringing the health industry profits since 1830
Now if they come out with a study showing the radon gas in parents' basements make you live longer, we'll be an indestructable force!
.
Trolling is a art,
They came first for the smokers, And I didnâ(TM)t speak up because I wasnâ(TM)t a smoker;
And then they came for the under weight, And I didnâ(TM)t speak up because I wasnâ(TM)t under weight;
And then they came for the obese, And I didnâ(TM)t speak up because I wasnâ(TM)t obese;
And then... they came for me... And by that time there was no one left to speak up.
The study showed that underweight people were 70 percent more likely than people of normal weight to die, and extremely obese people were 36 percent more likely to die.
Wait... I'm confused... how is an underweight person 70 percent more likely to die than 100% of people dying. This... does not add up!
Or perhaps it is better to be extremely obese so as to have a higher chance of being immortal than skinny people?
My other sig is just as lame
I would say everyone is 100% likely to die.
For example, I am 5'10" and typically weigh around 175 lbs. This gives me a BMI of 25.1 or slightly overweight.
But this is far from the case, as I'm an avid athlete (I've completed 4 marathons in less than 2 years), a healthy eater, and if you saw me you'd be hard-pressed to find where I carry any of this supposed extra weight, as I have a lean build and a low percentage of body fat, but a good deal of muscle.
I suspect this is the case with many of these so-called "slightly overweight" folks, they're actually in pretty good shape and have too much muscle which BMI does not account for.
"But overweight individuals defined as a body mass index of 25 to 29.9 were 17 percent less likely to die than people of a normal weight defined as a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9."
Man, now that I know dying is optional, I'll have to start eating more...
Seriously, does anybody ever actually pay attention to how they phrase this stuff?
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I've seen some of these scales (you are this tall and you weight this much, you have a bmi of xxx and you are this overweight.) I'm sorry but for me to be at the BMI they suggest, I would have to shed all the muscle mass I have and become sickly thin. Perhaps the "Normal weight" they classify is actually people who could stand to gain a few pounds.
To a lot of these charts, the sickly thin super models are of "Normal weight".. Yet they die eariler than people with a few more pounds.. Hrmmm.
I wonder if the 70% knock for underweight counts deaths from starvation.
Overweight may not be the problem we thought it was, said Dr. David H. Feeny, a caveman, "Overweight was protective."
That's slightly overweight, fatties.
Because slightly overweight people are happy. Puggy people can eat most foods and not feel overly guilty and at the same time enjoy not being overly criticized by society. I believe mental health and well being plays a much larger roll in overall health than what modern/western medicine believe it to be.
They've been working up to outlawing eating fattening foods-- you can see it in the research being funded and articles in the paper and magazines.
So now what? Force you to eat if you are underweight (70%??? Wow!)?
BMI is also a problem. I'm 268-- 6'5". My doc says I should be 235.
Problem is I have a six pack, visible veins sticking out on my arms and legs, and you can see individual muscle sections moving when I move. So I'm fairly lean.
But my BMI is high. I can lose weight- probably 25 pounds-- no one thinks I can make 235-- not even the doctor any more. I'd have to burn off muscle to hit that weight.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
As someone who has been extremely underweight (body fat percentage down to 3.4%), 50 pounds overweight, and also a track runner in good shape, I can agree with this. Underweight is by FAR the worse: you feel absolutely horrible because your body doesn't have the nutrients you need to rebuild your body and keep it in good shape. It took me years to completely recover from that. There is nothing worse than waking up in the morning and feeling just as bad as when you went to bed because your body hasn't been able to repair itself in the night.
If you are the exact weight you need to be, then you need to have a very well balanced diet, that includes all the nutrients you need in the proper proportions. Otherwise, obviously, you are going to be missing a few nutrients you need.
If you are a little overweight, it's not nearly as hard to have a balanced diet: you can have a higher percentage of carbohydrates and lower percentage of protein in your diet and still be ok, because you are eating more than you need of both. It is more flexible and easier, even if less attractive.
And don't forget to eat broccoli. You're going to have to eat a lot of beef and wheat and other foods to make up for the nutrients you are not getting in green vegetables. That can put you far overweight, especially as you age.
Qxe4
I can see that the intent of the article will lead to immense amounts of false justification. See, the majority of people that are overweight usually arrive at that state from extended periods of poor eating habits (or lots of drinking), inactivity or a combination of both.
It also appears that both articles base their study largely on BMI, which is well-known for being an outdated indicator of health in relation to weight. It works for those that are not athletic or abnormal, but is unreliable for anyone in those two categories. What might have been a better criterion for this study was body fat, which correlates much better to a person's weight.
Intuitively, I agree with the point made here. From the little that I know about nutrition, I've read that having some extra weight (apart from lean body weight and the necessary amount of body fat) helps the body function much better in everyday situations. Should this reach mass media, I'm almost positive that this, amongst other things, will be the excuse for those that don't wish to consider improving their health and lifestyle choices.
Oh well. Mental masturbation never fails to relieve.
BMI is worse than useless. BMI, or Body Mass Index, is essentially a glorified height-to-weight ratio. Sounds like exactly what needs to be measured, right? No. What if I told you I was 6'2" and 225 lbs? What do I look like? You have no idea. I could be pudgy and out of shape, or I could be muscular and ripped. Muscle adds bodyweight, just like fat. This means that BMI counts athletic people as overweight. Yes, it actually penalizes the people who are in the best shape. Now, I don't know to what degree this affects this particular study, but it's entirely possible that the individuals who are "slightly overweight" are actually just the individuals who exercise a little more than most and thus carry a little more muscle than average.
What's so frustrating is that everyone has known for years that BMI is not appropriate for, well, anything, and yet people continue to use it.
I'm serious, be very careful with BMI. I'm 5'9" at 185 pounds which would give me a BMI of about 27 making me technically overweight. However, I am a runner and go to the gym twice a week and have 11% body fat making me below average as far as fat percentage is concerned. BMI is not always a good indicator of being overweight...
The study defines over/underweight by the BMI, and not measuring the percentage of body fat.
That renders any findings moot.
"They" say being slightly overweight leads to a longer life than "normal" weight. Perhaps the reality is "they've" defined normal a little too low.
Last I checked, 100% of people die (Dick Clark excluded, of course), regardless of if you're underweight or overweight.
A little extra blubber keeps the Canucks from freezing. It's science.
Someone with a high BMI might be overweight - or they might be in really good shape and have lots of muscle.
Just something to think about.
That's true. I'm in that category but only 5 lbs and with my doctor's input. Meaning, My ideal weight shouldn't be over 151, and she thinks that I should be more like 156ish - being within the charts was a little too lean for me.
OTH, I can't tell you how many guys I know with big guts who say that these studies prove that there's nothing wrong with them.
A little knowledge ...
I must say that I usually feel better when I'm 2 or 3 kilos over the maximum weight that I may have according to the BMI 'norm.'
-- Cheers!
This is one of those feelgood reports that fat asses will flock to with their greasy chubby KFC laden hands.
So why dwelve on those 30%+ tubs of goo that roam the countryside?
Things arent so bad. Really, its just bad BMI readings.
While BMI isnt perfect, this map gives you an idea of how fat the country has become in the past 20 years:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/fit.nation/obesity.map/
THere is a big differences with having a little fat covering the ab muscles to those big fat mamas you see everywhere that look like theyre concealing livestock under their clothes. But every John Popper (before surgery) fat ass is going to say that this applies to them. If you havent seen your genitals in a few years, it doenst apply to you.
Wine isnt dangerous for you and some studies even claim it is beneficial but I would never recommend an alcoholic have a glass a day, some people should stay away from it.
Just like junk food. Micheal Phelps can eat all the junk he wants, it doesnt mean the waddling penguins of this country should.
Pass me those cheetos (please).
...or is it just that it takes longer for friends and family of the slightly overweight people to realize the fact they are still on the couch is not normal.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'd really like to see the curves, and not just the conclusions on this study.
This 1999 study by Calle et al. suggested that the optimum BMI is about 22-24. The new study summary says people with BMI 25 to 29.9 are less likely to die than people with B.M.I. 18.5 to 24.9.
The problem is that there's a huge difference between "18.5" (= way underweight) and "24.9" (around the optimum). That's just too large a data bin to be useful. It's too large to be able to tell if the new data contradicts the old data, or not.
What does the mortality vs mass curve look like?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Why would the researchers be surprised by this? Jesus, you don't need to be in medicine (I'm not, but I am interested, and my Dad's a doctor) to easily know that a few extra pounds are good for you.
When people get sick, their body often turns cannibalistic; consuming itself to try and heal. If you have no extra weight, then your body will start consuming muscle tissue, and all the associated problems that brings.
By having some fatty tissue in excess of the ideal BMI, you provide yourself a reservoir of energy which your body can use in the event of illness.
Certainly a "normal healthy" weight person who gets sick may end up quite frail after an illness, making it more likely they'll be injured, or suffer an infection subsequently.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
This article is extremely flawed using the BMI, I have played football most my life and now play Rugby. I work out every day so my BMI says I am obese when in reality I'm just muscle. Muscle weighs more than fat, that's a fact. I would love to see the doctors and scientists who did this study. I they probably are all overweight slobs. This is just another flawed perspective that is fattening America...it like a few years back when some doctor said that being fat was a disease. PUT THE FORK DOWN!
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
There's a big problem with the BMI. It's a quadratic aproximation to a cubic mesure. I.e. the body should be proportional to the cube of the height. But they approach by a square. I've seen that big people is always overweight according to BMI. I was training ice hockey four times per week, playing in two leagues, and I was in top condition. My actual weight was 96kg, but I was supposed to be 82kg according to the BMI.
I don't know why don't they use body fat percentage. May be because they don't want to invest in modern measuring technology.
BMI is completely inaccurate. I'm been overweight according to BMI for the past 15 years, if I drop closer to the "normal" rating, people start asking if I'm sick or not eating enough. If I was my "perfect BMI" weight, I'd be unhealthily scrawny. As someone said above "bullshit measuring index."
If you do any kind of regular exercise for a long period of time, you may as well throw BMI out the window.
"70 percent more likely than people of normal weight to die" did they also find the fountain of youth?
It's the other way around: they found the fountain of zombies, and it's apparently in Canada!
Normal people have a 100% chance of dying (obviously), so these poor saps must have a 170% chance of dying. On average, therefore, they will die 1.7 times each. Damn Canadian zombies.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Being overweight most certainly leads to a larger coffin or urn for ashes! Or, you end up feeding mama bear and the whole family whereas a scrawny human might only feed mama with a taste for the kids. Rebalance your weight the only safe and real way - by burning more calories each day than you consume! Look at it this way, being overweight gives you a more spacious box to not exist in after you're dead. Kinda like more space to not stretch your legs.
It makes sense. Anyone who has been sick or undergone serious stress knows that weight loss often comes along with that. If you have "a few extra pounds" hanging around, then your body has some reserves to use when you get sick. On the other hand, if you're already rail thin, your body is going to start digesting muscles and organs when it needs nutrients. Doing that will just lead to further problems.
You may live a little longer, fat ass, but you'd still be a fat ass.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The article mentions that they "controlled" for physical activity. Does that mean that they compared like for like? Fat couch potatoes with skinny ones, fat joggers with skinny ones? I'm not a statistician but it seems on the face of it there's a problem: Being overweight generally causes you to become less physically active, so comparing normal joggers to heavy joggers is comparing someone of high-normal fitness to an obese person who's extraordinarily fit (for their weight range). The comparison may not be fair because that extraordinarily fit person could have good genes to begin with.
That aside, people who are skinny are sometimes skinny for health related reasons: cancer, AIDS, drugs. Here it's not the fact that they're skinny which is the issue but their low weight is a symptom of health problems. A more complex take on that would be a person who has lost weight because they were ordered to by their doctor. They're diabetic or have high blood pressure. So yes, they've lost weight and are healthier than before, but still less healthy than the slightly overweight person whose doctor didn't make them lose weight because they didn't have metabolic syndrome. Again, the low weight would not be a cause of illness, but an (indirect) effect.
Also, if it's true that you tend to gain weight every year you remain alive, then people who live a long time are more likely to be overweight. Not because they're heavy but because they're still alive. And people who die prematurely young are more likely to be skinny, not because they're malnourished, but because they simply didn't live long enough for a slow metabolism to pack on the pounds.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
BMI is like judging the value of a diamond on carat weight only. Much more goes into it than that.
Take for example, me. According to the typical categories, at 6'2", my normal range is 144lbs - 195lbs. Now, I'd love for you to look at a 6'2" guy that weight 144 and tell me he's normal (implicitly healthy) in weight. I have cancer patients that weigh more than that. And plenty of in shape guys that are 6'2" weigh well over 195. Science light...go America (and, apparently Canada).
BMI Categories:
Underweight = 18.5
Normal weight = 18.5-24.9
Overweight = 25-29.9
Obesity = BMI of 30 or greater
The "ideal" BMI is decided by cultural fashion.
The right BMI in N.America & Northern Europe is actually considered malnourished by a lot of other people.
A BMI of 20 is ill. A BMI of 26 is not borderline anorexic.
I have a BMI of 36 and agree that loosing some weight would be a good thing. Getting it down to 24.9 would not only be difficult, it would also be seriously stupid!
What a stupid way to interpret the data... surely a more logical way to look at this would be to assume that how we are defining, "normal weight" is completely wrong and that "slightly overweight" is actually the correct, "normal weight".
What do we mean by overweight or underweight if what we mean is not the optimum weight for the greatest longevity? I have long suspected that what modern society regards as a the optimum weight is not. This has changed throughout history. Look at the concept of beauty in ancient Rome or early Europe -- fat chicks. Looked at in another way, the question also plays into evolutionary biology. As hunter-gathers we would fatten in summer months in preparation for the Winter. Now that (for most /. readers and most of the world of which we are aware) food is available at all times of year so there is far more obesity. But I donâ(TM)t think anorexic models are the standard to which we should strive.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
If your BMI is over what it should be then you are overweight whether that mass consists of muscle or lard. Muscle is clearly preferable but a 16 stone muscle man will struggle at running a decent distance more than a regular 11 stone person and will put more strain on your heart than a tub of goo around your waist. So the BMI certainly doesn't fail for that scenario its still a good guide to adhere to.
Re: "Being Slightly Overweight May Lead To Longer Life"
. . . and most slashdotters recoiced!
Seriously though, I've been working out. Most people do not believe me but I'm 50 lbs overweight. I've tried atkins, I've tried restricted calorie diets, and so forth, all to no avail. I have adrenal gland problems (I have CAH so most of my fat is around the waist) and so I'm battling that, and usually wear sweaters in effort to hide the fat.
So, even though my schedule makes it very difficult, I joined a gym and now work out 3-4 days a week. I do 20 minutes to a half hour of cardio and then some weight training. I didn't do Curves because I think their method is stupid (rotate through machines - 10 minutes on $FOO machine, NEXT! 10 minutes on $bar machine, NEXT!) so I go to a really small gym with a fantastic personal trainer. I haven't lost weight yet but have slimmed down quite a bit so I can only come to the conclusion that some of my hard-to-lose fat has been replaced by muscle.
Longer life or not, I do not want the extra weight. My goal is to get down to 10 lbs underweight like I was most of my life before my adrenal glands finally decided to go south.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
In 1998, the NIH changed the definition of what it meant to be overweight. It has since been changed -again- (note from the CNN article that a BMI of 26 was still considered 'normal' after this first change).
That's nonsense.
Everyone dies.
Or maybe wealthiest people are usually in the slightly overweight bracket. As welthiest people are also usually the healthiest for a variety of reasons not related to their BMI, ... Just an idea.
When your research indicated that overweight people live longer, what it's really telling you is that your definition of "overweight" is broken. And BMI is, indeed, seriously broken, since it does not take in to account age, build, or even sex. BMI says that a man and a woman of the same height should be the same weight. Which is medically dangerous quackery.
The BMI formula was created by a mathematician, not a doctor or someone with medical training. It was pushed as a medical standard by phamracuetical companies that have invested heavily in weight loss drugs. When they found that the 1985 standards for obesity (~27.5) wasn't selling enough weight loss prescriptions, they pushed to lower the threshold to 25 instead.
The reason there are more overweight Americans in the last ten years is that the definition of overweight was changed in 1998. You'll never see a news article that says "Americans used to average ### pounds in weight, and now they average ###+n pounds, or even that the average BMI used to be ## and is now ##+n. All you'll ever see is "there are more overweight americans, with no explanation of how this is determined.
Because, dammit! those pharmaceutical execs have boat payments to make!
Can we just define the term "normal weight" to mean "the one where you live the longest"?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
what you describe as the ideal curvaceous woman is a man's idea of an attractive woman. a woman's idea of an attractive woman is not the same as a man's idea of an attractive woman. for whatever reason, a lot of women are very self-loathing. and no, its not the usual bogeyman we try to blame for our own behavior, "the media", its some sort of innate psychological thing. a lot of women really think the body of a prepubescent boy is the ideal female appearance for some reason
if you take a woman with a banging bod, subject her to constant attention from all men, she can still go home and look in the mirror and find something to criticize. and she does: she think's she's too fat
the fashion industry has no real power. the fashion industry is given power by the people who buy clothes: women. and there's a lot of self-loathing in the female world. a shame
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sure, not exercising and participating in (dangerous) sports activities won't get you many injuries, now will it? /waiting for an operation for a fractured clavicle, cycling accident, BMI ~21 :)
Now the middle-age spread had been proven to be not only normal, but beneficial. Junk food science has a couple good articles on this study: http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/06/even-obesity-paradoxes-cant-excuse.html and http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/06/paradoxes-compel-us-to-think-part-two.html
This study seems to be mis-reported. It isn't that being a bit overweight reduces mortality slightly--it is that the definition of "overweight" based upon an arbitrary number calculated using an incorrect formula called BMI is incorrect.
If studies are showing that people who have lower mortality and/or better health overall are in the wrong classification, it is time to re-define the classifications at the least, or overhaul the entire methodology.
First of all, BMI is such a flawed measure of health that it is not only useless it borders on harmful. The formula itself makes no sense physically--it is a ratio of mass to SQUARE of height. The SQUARE? That rougly correlates to an area...hence the formula only makes sense if people are rougly the shape of a sheet of paper! A more reasonable approximation would have us use the CUBE of our height. Better yet, use the power of 2.5 as body shape varies with height in a similar fashion. Even better, the heght^2 factor should be modified to (waist circumference)* (height^2) as it is clinically demonstrated that carrying mass about the waist causes increased health problems.
There are also assumptions that are made that many people don't fit into, making all statistics based on BMI invalid and discredited:
* the BMI standards indicating 25 and up is overweight assume a sedentary lifestyle. Those who work in labour-intensive jobs (construction, farm labour, etc) or do weight training are likely to skew upwards. Likewise active people who run marathons, or do cardio-intensive activities might skew downwards and report underweight even though they are in very good health.
* Becasue of the flawed formula to calulate BMI subjects it only demonstrates significant validity within a narrow height range--perhaps between 1.65m to 2m in height. As such, children cannot be measured against the standard BMI scale (charts are used instead but even those are flawed). Very tall people are also found to be mis-classified.
* 25 is an arbitrary cut-off with no clinical evidence conclusively justifying the overweight label. This study suggests the limit should be raised if BMI continues being used as an indicator. It is bewildering, but some suggest the number should be LOWERED--but that is mostly suggested in Asia where people tend to be shorter than the range where the normal standard works and the standards need adjusting.
By BMI I am 4kg away from being "clinically obese" yet by percentage body fat I am just inside the "physically fit" category most of the time (I vary between 15 to 20 percent fat depending on method used to estimate and time of year, etc--fair bit higher than "athelete" but in a healthy range). I am health conscious but no means exceptionally different in build from a great many people, especially those raised in rural Canada as I was. The BMI does loosely correlate with health problems, but becasue of how severely flawed it is it is dangerous to put too much credence in it, yet disturbingly BMI is too often abused:
* governments base health policies on BMI--public money is spent to combat obeisity as defined using this incorrect methodology
* insurance companies and so on base premiums in part on BMI. Being falsely classified as obese could be costly.
* people, especially women, are always under pressure to lower weight to meet what is oftentimes an unrealistic goal. Instead of focusing on health, there is a fixation on achieving an arbitrary look or number. The BMI is all the more damaging because unlike Cosmo which is all image and no substance, BMI is preceived as a clinical measurement that indicates health. There may be many weight consious people fixated on BMI when...FOR THEM...it may not be adviseable to worry about being "under 25" and instead just focus on a healthy diet and level of physical activity.
My thought is, as joking posted elsewhere in this discussion, that BMI is perpetuated by an large by the weight-loss industry. If focus was put on actual health indicators--or at
The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin'.
No wait... That was Spinal Tap.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
1. This is old news.
2. They mean 20-30 lbs. overweight, not 100. I.e. the peak of the longevity Bell curve is about 20-40 pounds more than the supposed medically desirable weight. Then it goes back down again.
The guy giving the South Park kids a run for their money on WoW has a life expectancy significantly lower than the "normal" weight people, who are lower than the "overweight but not obese" people.
Cartman, however, remains doomed.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I remember reading a study like this something like 2 years ago. I don't think this is a new idea at all. As I recall, the conclusion of the one I read a while back was that people who are a little bit overweight tend to exercise more frequently than people who are at a normal weight in an effort to lose the extra weight, and the extra exercise gave them bonus health points. Basically, by constantly wanting to lose that extra 10 lbs, you improve your cardiovascular health in a way that far outweighs the negative impacts of carrying an extra 10 lbs.
It makes sense to me that people who are obese don't see the same advantages, because I imagine there is very little interest or incentive in getting out to exercise when you have such a long road to fitness in front of you. It also makes sense for obvious reasons that people who are naturally underweight or at a normal weight have less social pressure to get out and exercise.
So the way it sounds, maybe our definition of "Normal" isn't normal, and is infact underweight? Maybe those "Slightly obese" are actually "normal" in the BMI index?
I find this hard to believe.
Go to an old folks home and you will see that almost all of the residents have slim builds.
(Presumably because the other body types have died)
Maybe most people didn't know, but I knew that for a long time now. That additional 10 pounds in fat for an adult male add more health and protect from a lot of viruses. And older you get, the more the upper limit is :)
I am overweight bordering on obese. The last time I was seriously ill was in 2002.
You are not slightly overweight. In fact, if you would lay down on the beach, Greenpeace would drag you back to sea. So get yourself a proper meal instead of three super sized hamburgers and start jogging.
It seems to me that a huge danger of a population study like this is that they can't easily allow for things that *cause* people to be underweight. For instance, many people with cancer will lose weight because of their disease (or because of chemo.) So if you measure their weight, find it "below average" and then they die, it doesn't mean that the lower weight increased the death risk. It means that the thing that killed them first caused weight loss. That's going to make lower weight in general look riskier all the way up from underweight to overweight.
The cake is a pie
Why do people use BMI? It was developed in the 1800's by a guy who didn't know anything about health, not to mention there are numerous articles on how there are many better methods to classify people's health in respect to weight. I can't believe that people would design a study based on a poor classification system.
I feel a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of hands are reaching for Big Macs...
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
seriously look how BIG them people are , tell me that's healthy.
I swear they all come form a fat factory and there eating all the food the rest of Canada doesn't get.
Studies like these are heavily flawed for several reasons.
1. This particular study is specifically aimed at an urban population of a cold temperate country.
2. Healthcare. Medical science is at the stage where you can stuff yourself to the size of a hippo and have a heart bypass, a stomach stapling and liposuction and undo enough of the damage to give yourself a few decades to live.
3. If you see yourself as trim and fit and healthy you would probably be a lot less receptive to the idea of seeing a doctor.
4. BMI is flawed. Plenty of healthy, perfectly well proportioned but very muscular people have BMIs in the slightly overweight range.
Yeah, but the underweight-to-average people probably got far more sex with hotter people and had more fulfilling lives. They also escaped the worst illnesses of age. Weight is one of the last criterion people feel able to discriminate against. (Socio-economic factors are the other.) Unfortunately, while discrimination on other factors is falling, the discrimination on these are on the increase. (With obesity being cited in health insurance, global warming, etc)
The moment you start measuring life by longevity and not quality, you set yourself up for a disappointing life. There should be only three rules: 1) that your parents don't outlive you. 2) you live long enough for your kids (if any) to become adults 3) at any moment you should be happy with the life you lived if you were to die right then. This whole longevity thing doesn't make sense. You /will/ die sometime. Odds are you won't be able to when and the manner of your passing. So just enjoy live. Life is a terminal condition. Don't fear the inevitable, but prepare for it.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
There's an even chance that this will either shift the ideal range of BMI or place more emphasis on factors other than BMI. Maybe both.
BMI is a stupid measure. IIRC, it was developed in the 1830's for some kind of sociology study, nothing to do with health, diet, etc.
Penn & Teller's BullSh*t has a good episode called "The Obesity Epidemic is Bullshit", which is currently on Netflix streaming. They make the point that Brad Pitt is overweight and George Clooney is obese, according to BMI. And this is what they base our insurance premiums on....
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
wow...i was not aware that upto 24.9 bmi meant normal weight. Im 22.3 and 12.4% body fat and i think i could do with losing 2-3 kilos so i dunno how it works out. I don't trust the BMI thing cuz its too inaccurate. One of my friends is tall and very muscular. Due to this his BMI works out to be 31 which would mean that he is obese. BMI really can't be used cuz it does not account for the percentage of fat.
... showed a similar result, until they controlled for for that.
Teetotalers were on average somewhat more likely to die than people who had a few drinks each week. Sounds like the same thing. Until someone realized that there were two subgroups of teetotalers: lifetime teetotalers and former alcoholics. The former alcoholics had a history of drinking a lot, but currently drank nothing. When they split those two groups apart, the lifetime teetotalers were the healthiest group.
I'd bet that the same thing will eventually be found here. There are two subgroups within the normal weight group: those who have always been healthy as distinct from those who have 'normal' BMI because they have some other health problem that affected their weight
...Fat and Happy for a reason!
If this is the case, shouldn't "Slightly Overweight" be redefined to "Ideal weight" and "Ideal Weight" be slightly underweight?
Or do we consider dying early a side effect of being perfect?
I should live forever!!!
These sorts of findings have been produced from historical studies as well, and in the past follow-ups have always shown that the reason for this discrepancy is that people tend to drop in weight as their health decays due to disease or chronic condition, often falling from the 'overweight/obese' slot into the ideal range as their condition progresses. Hitting the article and the original study, the author's seem to have failed to control for pre-existing conditions such as diabetes, autoimmune disease, or heart disease, despite the fact that these faults have been repeatedly highlighted in the past.
Why don't they just call slightly overweight normal then?
I mean really, if some "extra" weight leads to longer life maybe it isn't extra.
-- QED
do you think that once, just once, an article could mention error bars? Please? This comic pretty much summarizes how much I trust articles like this: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
I am drought and famine resistant!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The research took into account physical activity, as stated in both the Slashdot summary and the article itself. This doesn't tell you exactly how much "high BMI due to muscle not fat" got taken into account, but it tells you it is at least partially, and probably significantly, taken into account since people with lots of muscle will usually also have a high level of physical activity.
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
It seems more likely to me that our metrics for healthy weight are wrong. If a few pounds more increases lifespan than a few pounds more is what we need our charts to read as healthy weight.
Looks like even the folks who wrote TFA didn't read it. At the bottom, the link for "more information on weight" goes directly to a page about how to lose it. Okay, not directly: You have to choose your geographic region (I assume this is because of different levels of gravity at various altitudes and latitudes).
Why - because it looks at actuarial tables and predicts who survives the longest. So yes, while you are "in shape" with a BMI of 28, your heart still has to pump blood for all that extra tissue, and it just might, on average, tend to crap out earlier than in a thinner persons . By your reasoning, what about those ridiculous body builder guys - they have lots of muscle, work out a lot, etc - are they healthy?. Remember that people used to think a dark tan was healthy too- before we learned about skin cancer.
It pays to be within the norm - not too tall, not too short, not too overweight (ie muscular OR fat), etc.
This study is looking at elderly people in Canada, and not the young. Geriatric patients also tend to lose weight before they die. The paper is flawed in that it should probably exclude peoples weight for a year or two before they die A comparison would be nice to look at say a thinner population (Japanese, some Europeans), and compare life expectancy with BMI between the groups.
..........FULL STOP.
It just means overweight - from EITHER too much muscle or too much fat - you weigh more than the norm.
People are getting bent out of shape, 'cause they associate overweight with being fat - but BMI doesn't say that.
..........FULL STOP.
Teetotalers were on average somewhat more likely to die than people who had a few drinks each week. Sounds like the same thing. Until someone realized that there were two subgroups of teetotalers: lifetime teetotalers and former alcoholics. The former alcoholics had a history of drinking a lot, but currently drank nothing. When they split those two groups apart, the lifetime teetotalers were the healthiest group.
That's a nice anecdote. Too bad it isn't true.
There has, recently been some criticism of the correlation between moderate drinking and reduced mortality on the basis of the "correlation does not prove causation" argument. There may be some other lifestyle or health activity which moderate drinkers do, but teetotalers don't do, which benefits health. But, even if you control for former drinkers, the correlation between moderate drinking and reduced mortality apparently holds up.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
For every storey on obesity, we get this argument. What I have learned:
An individual evaluating his own health should measure his waist, and just look in the mirror.
On a weigh-loss program, monitor your waist, as its the internal abdominal (visceral) fat thats the big problem.
Yes, you can have a BMI of 30, and not be fat. If your waist is less than 94cm (37") for a man, then great. But its unlikely.
Lots of people are strong with good aerobic fitness, but still at risk of heart disease etc from too much body fat.
The Australian government has been doing a TV campain, and has a good website:
http://www.measureup.gov.au/internet/abhi/publishing.nsf/Content/Home
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_obesity#Diagnosis
Well, I have a fun anecdote for you.
A month ago I thought exactly the same thing that you do: just because you're eating fat doesn't mean it sticks to you. ...and, actually, that's still true. It's more complicated than that.
Months ago I came across this news item:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/cp-adr122908.php
I read the article that the scientists wrote in Cell Metabolism (it was actually free at the time, but not anymore), which was nice and scientific and all. They took some mice, fed them a high fat diet, waited for them to become obese, then did some tests to determine if the cellular stress they suspected of causing obesity had occured. Then they gave the mice some drugs to reduce this cellular stress and, like magic, they began eating less and exercising more and lost a lot of weight, all of their own free will. (Naturally they used a lot of control groups, but I'm just summarizing.) It was nice to see that real scientists were working on the weight loss problem, given that the weight loss industry is all about pointless bullshit.
Anyway, after tiring of eating mostly oatmeal cream pies, I switched to a diet of ice cream for about a week, at which point I randomly weighed myself and found that I weighed 260 pounds, which was up from the rather steady 250-255 I had seen for the past year. I was sick of ice cream by that point anyway, so I went to the store and picked up some Stouffers heat-it-in-a-pan meals, for no reason other than that they looked good.
While cooking the stuff, I noticed the fat content was really low. Eating an entire bag was only 25% of the recommended fat intake. This made me start thinking about that study those scientists did, and how, while they seemed to carefully consider all sorts of variables, something they seemingly assumed to be an absolute truth was that the path to obesity was a high-fat diet. In fact it seemed to be their theory that the high fat diet causes some sort of stress in the leptin-sensing cells in the brain, causing the brain to believe the body has less fat than it actually does.
Thinking about it, if it were true that high fat diets cause obesity, it would be the simplest experiment to confirm it. Get some mice, feed one group a high-fat diet, the other a low-fat diet, let both groups eat as much as they like, and see what happens. Surely if it weren't true, scientists researching obesity would know.
This all got me thinking: Assuming I'm overweight because I've eaten high fat foods and reduced the leptin sensitivity in my brain, would eating a low fat diet allow that leptin sensitivity to restore itself? Since I had a week's worth of Stouffers meals anyway, I decided to find out.
I'd tried low-calorie diets before, but they never went anywhere. As I tell people all the time: Hunger is regulated by the brain. If you're not eating what it wants you to, you'll spend all day thinking about food. Despite popular belief, overweight people don't eat for the joy of it. I was eating only oatmeal pies because I simply couldn't convince myself to eat anything else, and I really didn't like the oatmeal pies all that much either. It was just that whenever hunger became uningnorable, it was easy to eat one and get back to whatever I was doing.
Even though the Stouffers meals were fewer calories than I was used to, I initially started out with just two bags a day, which is only 1500 calories or so, and yet I didn't really feel any need to eat more than that. I expected that after a day or two my brain would wise up to the fact that the same volume of food was now fewer calories, and cause me to want to eat more, but it didn't happen. I was sort of hungry, but it was the kind of hu
See, for example, http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jea/14/Supplement_I/14_S18/_article for a study in Journal of Epidemiology showing what I wrote. There are more.
Ah crap. Posting to undo mis-moderation. I enjoyed the parent posting.
Being severely underweight is usually a sign that you are sick, not that you are a lean mean fighting machine. A correlation of underweight with high death rate proves ... absolutely nothing about "healthy" weights.
But I decided to get myself a four-cheese pizza first.
I guess I stop doing 80 situps every morning. If I had only known! What a waste of time!!
The study showed that underweight people were 70 percent more likely than people of normal weight to die, and extremely obese people were 36 percent more likely to die.
Hey, I am ten pounds overweight. Does that mean that I have a chance to live forever?
Given all these percentages there exists only one hard true fact - your 100% likely to die...oh yes I forgot about the taxes.
Assuming your account of your diet is accurate, I can tell you why you are overweight: you are not getting a balanced diet. Your brain triggers a hunger response when you are short of a particular nutrient. In most people, this manifests as a desire for a particular food that you have learned to associate with whatever your body is short of, but from your account it doesn't sound like you have managed to build this set of associations, so you are just reading it as an unfocussed desire to eat something.
If you keep eating the same thing, you are very likely to continue to be short of at least one of the nutrients you need, so your brain will keep triggering the hunger response even though you have an excess of everything else. This even applies to 'healthy' foods. For example, rice only contains about half of the amino acids that your body needs. If you keep eating rice, you will keep feeling hungry. Lentils contain the other half, but if you just eat rice and lentils then you will probably be low on fat, various vitamins, and so on.
Pre-packaged meals are generally very bad for this. They are generally very high in salt and low in vitamins. Take a look at the nutritional information. They generally have a percentage of RDA for each item. Your aim is not necessarily to get these all to 100% - they are averages and are different for every person - but you want to get them all close to the same amount. If a mean contains 50% of your protein requirements and 100% of your fat requirements then you will need to eat double your daily fat requirement to get the required amount of protein. Oh, and be careful of the fact that these oversimplify (for example, counting protein as a single value, when any given meal may not contain all of the amino acids you require).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The BMI is a piece of garbage when it comes to scientific value.
try to be slightly diabetic and cancerous too.
obsession with penis size: also a male-only thing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Congrats on finding something that works for you and being concerned about your weight.
First off, i'd say, please be careful how you lose weight. Weight is really only a very rough measure of fitness. You can probably fluctuate by 6-8 pounds just from water weight and salt intake. So don't be discouraged when you see it move up and down by several pounds within a couple of days. Waist measurements, photos, and how your clothes fit are the real measure of progress.
Also, please supplement with a daily vitamin. Losing weight is stressful on the body and if you are eating prepared meals you probably are missing some nutrients.
Any exercise you can do will help you reach your goals too. Even just walking every day.
And here are two tricks for you to not feel as hungry: drink lots of water (i chug a nalgene quart of water), eat smaller meals 5 times a day.
Your body lags between when you eat and when the hungriness goes away. If you wait until you are hungry you will overeat. But if you eat based on the clock, you will be able to eat smaller meals and never get to the point where you want to eat everything in sight.
I was on a modified atkins for 10 weeks eating 65% fat. You'd be surprised how much fat fills you up.
BMI means nothing. Its completely outdated and is a calculation that isnt aware of body type of msucle to fat ratio. If you want a better measurement or health use Body/Fat ratio's.
about the media and its supposed vast ability to control our thoughts
of course, as you say, you have a number of convenient reasons to completely ignore what i say
but then one wonders why you even bothered to fucking respond
i guess i am part of the media, and as such exert mind control over you, and compelled you to respond (snicker)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Did they control for the economic situation of the subjects? The article does not say that they did. If not, I suspect that's most likely the underlying causation. Wealthier people live longer, because they have better access to higher quality medical treatment, as well as gym memberships, better food, etc. And I'm pretty sure that wealthy people tend to be a little heavier than average, due to the higher availability of food.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
... not really applicable to individual people, though. BMI was developed as a statistical tool to do health studies on whole populations. Because you appear to be pretty muscular based on the information provided, you're an "outlier", and the BMI numbers for you are skewed. The gym where I work out has a poster from the US HHS department that spells out this exact thing - that a high BMI doesn't necessarily mean you're "too fat". You might just be muscular.
If they did, I didn't see it in the article. The problem is that sometimes the causation factor runs the other way - being unhealthy causes you to lose weight. If you have, say, AIDS, tuberculosis, or certain cancers, the disease both causes body wasting, and makes you die sooner. This can skew the statistics - yes, these people are skinny and died younger than they should have, but the skinniness didn't cause the early death - instead, both were caused by the underlying disease. It's possible that if you controlled for that, that underweight people wouldn't show such a tendency to die young.
At least in 1st world societies (the study was done in Canada, correct?), availability of calories isn't the issue. I believe demographic studies have shown that obesity is much more prevalent in lower income people... they can't afford healthy food (fresh fruits and veggies, etc), but Cheetos and McDonalds are relatively cheap.
Every single scare story so-called scientists and nutrition experts have come up with so far have proven to be bollocks.
I have proven this by ignoring them and I am still not dead.
Apparently we're only allowed 6g of salt a day. I have no idea how much salt I eat.
Apparently we're meant to drink 8 glasses of water a day. EXCEPT in fact we're supposed to *have* about 8 glasses of water a day, and most of it comes from food. So that means that people who have been drinking 8 glasses of water *and* eating every day are unhealthy. Otherwise, the amount of water above this should have no effect, right? Logically I mean. But it seems that people who drink more water than that pee a lot more, and people like me who don't drink much at all during the day should be ill or dead or something.
I'm not dead or ill.
I didn't stop ingesting sugar and I didn't stop drinking caffeine and I stopped drinking milk because that turned out to be bad for me as well, even though it's meant to be good for you.
Similarly, I have been ignoring all things that tell me what over or underweight is. I'm still alive and so is my wife. She is, apparently, 'morbidly obese', but she looks a perfectly normal shape to me. I am overweight, apparently, but I look quite thin.
And now! And now these bloody scientists have turned around and told us that "slightly overweight" is better for us than "normal weight"! By what measure, then, is "normal"? It's certainly not average, because most people I know are overweight, and, as a previous poster has said, even healthy people who go to the gym and bike every day are "overweight".
Perhaps those people who give false targets to people by printing pictures of photoshopped buff people in crappy magazines are in cahoots with the scientists, who have lowered the bar for 'normal' weight from 'healthy' to 'a bit too thin'.
Strikes me that if slightly overweight is healthier than normal weight than slightly overweight IS normal weight and normal weight is unhealthily thin.
Of course I am not going to believe any of my own logic here: it merely amuses me to point out logical inconsistencies when people are talking absolute bollocks. I'm sure there are dangerous levels of weight that can cause people to die prematurely but I am equally sure that there are many other factors involved that will shorten someone's life, such as how strong their heart is, how much shit they eat, and how often they get run over by buses.
74.117.115.116 32.97.110.111 116.104.101.114 32.80.101.114 108.32.104.97 99.107.101.114