Delinking weight and longevity

John Luik discusses the implications from the publication of the findings of a study on weight and mortality in the Journal of the American Medical Association:

It isn't just that they were fudging the numbers, it is the scope of the fudging that is so breathtaking. For the last few years Americans have been subjected to an incessant barrage of warnings about the risks of dying from being fat. The most dramatic of these came last year in a study from the US Centers for Disease Control that suggested that some 400,000 lives were lost each year due to obesity and that obesity related mortality would soon overtake tobacco as the leading cause of death in the US.

But in a study released this week by the CDC and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association ("Excess Deaths Associated with Underweight, Overweight, and Obesity"), the public health community has finally owned up to their massive fib by acknowledging that the number of deaths due to obesity in the US is closer to 26,000 not 400,000 as previously reported. This means that if these numbers are correct — which is questionable — then obesity goes from being the leading or second leading cause of death to perhaps the seventh leading source of premature mortality.

As I wrote in a post last year:

As an exercise, I plugged my own figures into the BMI calculation, to find that I'm technically considered obese (BMI 30.4). This was a bit disturbing, as I know I'm overweight, but not hugely so (pun unintentional). So, I plugged in the numbers for just before I got married, when I was almost literally starving, and found that that weight was considered "ideal" (BMI 21.5). This little exercise has persuaded me that BMI as an analysis tool is significantly flawed. . .

. . . at least as an individual tool for gauging your own health. As a "public health" tool, it's remarkably useful — for sowing fear, uncertainty, doubt, and (possibly) mass self-loathing. The kind of tool a soul-dead bureaucrat loves to have available.

Back to Luik's article:

Apart from this huge downward revision in the numbers of people supposedly dying from fat, there are several things in this study which signal the end of any legitimate linkage between obesity and premature death. First, for the merely overweight with BMI's from 25-30 there is no excess mortality. In fact, being overweight was "associated with a slight reduction in mortality relative to the normal weight category." Being overweight not only does not lead to premature death, something that dozens of other studies from around the world have been saying for the last 30 years, but it also carries less risk from premature death than being "normal" weight. In other words the overweight=early death "fact" proclaimed by the public health community is simply not true.

'Simply not true' is a bit of an understatement. Try: 'actually in direct contravention of the demonstrated facts'. Kind of like a statement from the Prime Minister's Office, now that I think about it.