Swine Flu Kills Obese People Disproportionately

Philip K Dickhead writes "Bloomberg is reporting that the World Health Organization discovered a single, surprising characteristic that's emerged among swine flu victims who become severely ill: They are all fat. Infected people with a body mass index greater than 40 suffer respiratory complications that are harder to treat and can be fatal. The virus appears to be on a collision course with the obesity epidemic. WHO officials are gathering statistics to confirm and understand this development. 'It's very likely that if we went back retrospectively and looked at people who did poorly during seasonal flu, what would shake out is that obesity would be one of the risks.' Fat cells secrete chemicals that cause chronic, low-level inflammation that can hamper the body's immune response and narrow the airways, says Tim Armstrong, a doctor working in the WHO's chronic diseases department in Geneva."

Comments

Well... yeh.

[yoursurrogategod]

Being obese is pretty much an invitation for all sorts of problems. I love my steak, fries, chocolate, soda and burgers, I just eat them once every other week in small quantities. It helps when I think of baby carrots and apples as snacks.

Re:Well... yeh.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have a simple issue with self control. If I did she'd be dead and I'd be up on murder charges. On the other hand I have a huge problem eating small portions. If I do I literally walk around voraciously hungry.

[snip]

Combine this with a desk job and yeah I _could_ try to make time for the gym (which I hate with a passion) but keeping up an excercise routine is to say the least problematic.

So, in other words, you have a complete lack of self control and are unable to motivate yourself to keep yourself healthy.

Losing weight is stupidly easy: eat less, exercise more. So you have a bad ankle, talk to your doctor to come up with an exercise routine that doesn't involve massive amounts of walking.

30 minutes a day. That's it. If you can't do that, then yes, it's a self control issue.

Re:Well... yeh.

[blahplusplus]

"and that even those that have the ability to lose weight can work their arses off and still lose nothing in a week."

I'm going to call bullshit on this, it's fucking impossible to NOT lose weight in a week if you are "working your ass off", you're certainly not working you ass off if you're not losing even half a pound or 1 pound in 7 days. Losing weight DOES require some amount of willpower and definitely requires a commitment hence (by and large) one is responsible for one's weight.

One cannot just excuse oneself unless one has a serious medical condition, but even those that are sick (your arthritis in your leg/angle) can do other exercises. For instance when I was lifting free weights and benching you still burn and awful lot of fat without having to move around that much. What matters is expending energy.

I walked at a leisurely pace 4hrs/day 7/days week and lost 10-12 lbs a month, it's a matter of *commitment* either you want to lose the weight or you dont, if you don't like high intensity you have to make up the lack of intensity with duration of time and distance for low intensity aerobics (like walking).

The biggest thing is monitoring your appetite, no amount of exercise will help if you're over-eating and taking in more energy then you're burning off. The army did a study a long while back that showed just this: Taking in too much energy negates the weight loss benefits of exercise and you don't have to starve youself either, just limit yourself to 1500-1800 cals/day and keep track of it on a site like http://www.fitday.com/

The truth is many people who are overweight have never been thin for most of their life and got fat fairly young and developed a victim psychology because of bullying/social prejudice.

There's only so much you can do to excuse yourself from being overweight.. I agree there are many different body types and some of us store fat easily on the smallest amounts of food, but many of us that store easily barely exercise.

The real issue though is not paying attention to how energy dense the food you're eating is, most people "wing it" when they eat they don't get rigorous ambout keeping track of the amount of food (see fitday.com), once you get rigorous and can see it on a chart, then you will realize that - yes, you are over eating!

I realized this when I started tracking what I ate @ www.fitday.com (a great site btw) and it is handy because it will show you the evidence and you can't just deny it anymore.

Most people live in the fog of their own mind never really looking hard at teh evidence in their own lives contradicting and lending support to the naysayers of "no willpower", the truth is it's more about being aware of your own bad/blind thinking on the matter of how you eat and live that is the root of the problem.

I know I went through it.

Re:Well... yeh.

[Lunzo]

If you're serious about losing weight you should not take dietary advice from some random slashdot poster and see a dietitian i.e. a qualified professional. Low carb, high fat & protein diets are a recent fad. There are other diets which work, and are better for you. A professional will be able to pick something appropriate to your situation.

Re:Well... yeh.

[ClosedSource]

Don't expect a serious discussion in response to your post. Although most people on Slashdot are smart and keep up with the latest technology, many have rather medieval attitudes when it comes to medicine.

Blaming the patient for the condition is one of those attitudes. Illness is like a "sin" to them, so the solution has to have some penance involved. "No pain, No gain" is one mantra of this religious belief.

Even the medical community has been guilty of this. Ulcers used to be all about stress and lifestyle until one doctor discovered the bacteria that was actually the cause. A simple triple antibiotic "no pain" solution worked while the "painful" lifestyle changes didn't.

Re:Well... yeh.

[Rich0]

Keep in mind that people are all different.

Some people can maintain a light weight with no effort all.

Some people can maintain a light weight with a moderate effort.

Some people can work hard and maintain a light weight.

Quite a few people have to put in a huge battle and really not get anywhere with it - or they make progress only to lose ground.

Look, I suspect that most people, if they worked REALLY hard, could do as well in math as I do. I'm not a complete prodigy or anything. However, I don't consider people lazy if they end up getting 70s on tests that I score in the high 90s on - that's just how it has been for all of my life - I can cruise through tests that most normal people barely pass with a fair amount of study. However, why should they bother trying to reach my level of proficiency at math? They should just spend their time on something they're better at, and learn enough math to get by in normal life. (Yes - I realize that quite a few people who read this post could outperform me in math - that isn't my point.)

I'm hardly morbidly obese, but I do struggle to keep my weight down. Maybe that means I'll live ten years less than my peers - I'm willing to accept that. I do try to control my diet, but the fact is that unless somebody comes out with some kind of medical advance I'm not going to be average in weight without a huge amount of effort. I'm not sure that effort is really worth it - I'd rather die happy at 70 than suffer until 80. :) And if somebody comes up with better healthy ways to lose weight that don't involve huge amounts of self-deprivation, then that is just a win-win for everybody. Sure, maybe in the meantime I'll statistically cost society more to keep alive than the "average" person, but last time I checked I was paying far more in taxes than the average person and that's just how things work. In the meantime I'll keep working on my health, but if I can refrain from taunting people who weren't developing software in multiple languages in middle school in the 80s perhaps we can get beyond taunting people for having trouble controlling their weight?

Re:Well... yeh.

[Gulthek]

Actually, losing weight has little to do with exercise. You exercise to be healthy, you eat fewer calories than you burn to lose weight.

Hacket's Diet. Look it up, follow it, you'll lose (or gain, if you want) weight. It's the meta diet for all diets! With the hacker's diet you learn how your weight is completely arbitrary, you can weigh whatever you want!

Re:Well... yeh.

[twostix]

You should submit yourself to the department of energy immediately.

Your bodies ability to create matter out of thin air and somehow ignore the second law of thermodynamics by burning more energy than you ingest is nothing short of amazing!

*Or* you're just making the same tired old excuses that those with some vice *always make*. You claim that your body is somehow special and refuses to burn the energy that you put in well guess what - that means you are going to have to eat 1/4 of what you do now for the rest of your life end of story (unless there's some medical "cure"). OR, you can be continue being fat and whinge about it on Slashdot for the rest of your (more than likely) short life...

You need to expend more energy than you ingest per day, no amount of moral indignation can change the laws of physics.

Otherwise if you already are ingesting less than you expend then you are a scientific marvel and for the good of human kind please get make yourself known to some scientists in the relevant field.

On a side note you're at +5 which means that you've got a pretty general support from the people on here, it's kind of amusing how the basic laws of physics and "personal responsibility" ideals that are usually worshiped with religious fervor around here are kicked to the curb as soon as it's useful to do so.

Glad to see the highly "logical" slashdot hordes - to borrow a clique, are just as prone to self delusion and excuses when it suits as the masses that are so often looked down upon here for doing exactly the same thing are.

Dammit, BMI != fat in all cases

[EQ]

BMI is a bogus and misleading measure. Try percent body fat instead.

Re:Dammit, BMI != fat in all cases

[hedwards]

Actually in this case it's a perfectly valid way of looking at it. BMI was created for statistical analysis. And that's what it's being used for.

With the relatively small number of people that have died as a result of the H1N1 it's much easier to detect whether or not it's accurate for the group. But when doing models of how this is likely to shape out, the BMI is a perfectly legitimate way of doing it. The only other measure that's reasonable to consider is the waste to hip ratio, and that's not really designed for this.

Re:Dammit, BMI != fat in all cases

[Ironsides]

Or big muscled. According to this site, Hulk Hogan has a BMI of 31.9 The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) has a BMI of 34.3 Both of them fall under the BMI obese category. Seriously, The Rock is not fat.

Re:Dammit, BMI != fat in all cases

[Quothz]

BMI is a bogus and misleading measure. Try percent body fat instead.

Bogus, no; misleading, sometimes. Someone with a BMI over 40 is always fat, however. Even a 7-foot tall, heavily-muscled man cannot achieve that without huge rolls of fat or a stomach full of ball bearings.

Oversensitive, in this case it works

[SuperKendall]

Come on, the BMI they are recording is over 40 - categorized as "morbidly obese". The only people not actually very overweight that would hit that would be professional weight lifters...

For just seeing if someone is a touch overweight it's not a great tool. But in this case the observation is perfectly valid.

A reasoned discussion

[girlintraining]

I would be going to be very politically incorrect here, but people that are medically obese suffer a wide variety of ailments. If swine flu is what finally motivates these people to seek and complete treatment, why is this a bad thing? Or shall we continue to scream about the oppression of our right to be fat, forgetting that the virus doesn't give two sh--s either way.

Re:The story title is wrong ...

[sopssa]

Obesity is something you *can* fix. It's not like cancer or something else where you have little to nothing control over it. You can just do it, if you really want to.

stop using the term swine flu

[Eugene]

the term itself is misleading, the virus strand might have originated from swine, but the current flu has nothing to do with pigs. The proper term should be Influenza A (H1N1)

Re:The story title is wrong ...

[dgatwood]

Parent might be a troll, but depression is anything but off-topic. Depression is a major risk factor for obesity. It has often been observed that depressed people are more likely to fall victim to binge eating, which is a major cause of obesity. Depression can also be a symptom of hypothyroidism, IIRC, which causes low metabolism and can lead to obesity. The links between depression and obesity are not completely understood, but it is quite likely that reducing the incidence of depression will also reduce obesity.

Re:The story title is wrong ...

[fractoid]

Spoiler Alert: According to the book, the calorie balance hypothesis is wrong. Numerous studies over the years failed to link high-calorie diet with weight gain, but this fact was overlooked because it challenged nutritional and medical orthodoxy. The real culprit, as the title suggests, is the composition of the diet, not the absolute calories it contains. It's a fascinating read, well researched, and worth the trip to the library.

Uhh... I'm pretty sure if you can burn more calories than you consume, while still gaining/maintaining weight, then you could quite comfortably claim the Randi Challenge prize. And then you could sell your body to science for billions.

here's the big secret:

[circletimessquare]

eat less

exercise more

that's it. that's the magic. everything else is bloviating

everything else is a giant game of rationalization, victimization, and other psychological manipulations, internal and external

again: eat less, exercise more. end of story

cut the fat, in your thinking as well as on your body