God Bless Referrer Logs
Or I might never have seen this post. Very extensive and well-reasoned debate happening here, all stemming from that recent study about the dangers of overweight being overblown.
"The point is, the '400,000' study did not get an enormous P.R. push because of scientific merit. There was an idealogical need to trumpet a study proving that fat is 'the new tobacco'; and by serving the needs of ideology rather than science, the CDC put itself in a position where it deserved criticism... The huge publicity given the '400,000' did have a scaremongering effect; it encouraged a level of anti-fat hysteria unjustified by sound science. ('Hysteria' is the correct word; the director of the CDC called fat worse than the black plague.)"
If you're at all interested in the scientific debate about weight, there's a lot of food for thought in here.
"The point is, the '400,000' study did not get an enormous P.R. push because of scientific merit. There was an idealogical need to trumpet a study proving that fat is 'the new tobacco'; and by serving the needs of ideology rather than science, the CDC put itself in a position where it deserved criticism... The huge publicity given the '400,000' did have a scaremongering effect; it encouraged a level of anti-fat hysteria unjustified by sound science. ('Hysteria' is the correct word; the director of the CDC called fat worse than the black plague.)"
If you're at all interested in the scientific debate about weight, there's a lot of food for thought in here.
1 Comments:
I don't doubt that anti-fat bias has colored the media coverage of studies like these, but sheesh, the frenzy over this JAMA article seems kind of crazy to me.
For one thing, the CDC study referred to in that entry is not the only study showing that overweight is associated with increased health risks--there are five others cited in the JAMA paper alone, and possibly others out there. For that reason, I think it is prudent to view these results with some degree of skepticism.
That's not to say that what these authors found isn't real, but certainly, a lot more study is needed before the dogma that a BMI of 20-25 is healthiest gets changed. I think the first step would be to analyze the causes of death in these studies and try to get at a mechanism of how being overweight might be protective. There are a huge number of studies elucidating how having excess fat tissue can cause people to develop diabetes and heart disease, which lends some credibility to the previous epidemiological studies.
I don't know enough about epidemiology to critique the JAMA paper in detail, but there are some weird things about their data that seem suspicious, like the fact that they have contradictory findings from different cohorts in the same study. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this all turns out!
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