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Obesity: An Overblown Epidemic?

By the way, I consider a lot of the behaviours surrounding obesity to be in the general "social issues" category...
 
SezMe said:
Shoulda named the thread "Obesity: An Overgrown Epidemic?

Sorry...carry on.
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In many cases "overblown" I think is the correct word ;)
 
I agree that the BMI is an oversimplication and perhaps the studies are not accurate.

But the dissenters are also lying with statistics -
[T]he estimated hit to the average life expectancy of the U.S. population from its world-leading levels of obesity is four to nine months.
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If half the people are obese, then the life expectancy cost for the obese is 8 to 18 months. If 75% of the life drop is concentrated in the top 10 percent, then their life expectancy drops 3 to 6.75 years.

Also they talk about additional health treatment to prevent death but this ignores the costs of health care. For example, insulin shots for diabetics are expensive.

CBL
 
Let me have men around me that are fat. For there shall be a surfeit of rich widows, which may be life-threatening but are much more fun than lampreys.

I can't be bothered to check out the details, but this is so redolent of the "Smoking Don't Harm You" campaign that I'm highly skeptical.
 
CapelDodger said:
Let me have men around me that are fat. For there shall be a surfeit of rich widows, which may be life-threatening but are much more fun than lampreys.

I can't be bothered to check out the details, but this is so redolent of the "Smoking Don't Harm You" campaign that I'm highly skeptical.
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Well, maybe you should read the article then! If you see something that makes you think that the article is redolent of the "smoking don't arm you" stuff, please tell me! You also should remember that dieting is as much of a huge industry as is fast-food.

Personally, I'm particularly fed-up with all the self-image problems people (particularly women) seem to develop every time they put on a few pounds.
 
CBL4 said:
I agree that the BMI is an oversimplication and perhaps the studies are not accurate.

But the dissenters are also lying with statistics -
If half the people are obese, then the life expectancy cost for the obese is 8 to 18 months. If 75% of the life drop is concentrated in the top 10 percent, then their life expectancy drops 3 to 6.75 years.

Also they talk about additional health treatment to prevent death but this ignores the costs of health care. For example, insulin shots for diabetics are expensive.

CBL
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Uh... I don't know to what your observation is alluding. Here's the section where they talk about life expectancy in the article:

If all these simplifications are reasonable, the March paper concluded, then the estimated hit to the average life expectancy of the U.S. population from its world-leading levels of obesity is four to nine months. ("Two to five years" was simply a gloomy guess of what could happen in "coming decades" if an increase in overweight children were to fuel additional spikes in adult obesity.) The study did not attempt to determine whether, given its many uncertainties, the number of months lost was reliably different from zero. Yet in multiple television and newspaper interviews about the study, co-author David S. Ludwig evinced full confidence as he compared the effect of rising obesity rates to "a massive tsunami headed toward the United States."

Critics decry episodes such as this one as egregious examples of a general bias in the obesity research community. Medical researchers tend to cast the expansion of waistlines as an impending disaster "because it inflates their stature and allows them to get more research grants. Government health agencies wield it as a rationale for their budget allocations," Oliver writes. (The National Institutes of Health increased its funding for obesity research by 10 percent in 2005, to $440 million.) "Weight-loss companies and surgeons employ it to get their services covered by insurance," he continues. "And the pharmaceutical industry uses it to justify new drugs."
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It seems to me that the "dissenters" don't agree with those kinds of statistics.
 
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