Being Slightly Overweight May Lead To Longer Life 383
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.'"
Which one is it? (Score:1, Interesting)
More calories or less?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction [wikipedia.org]
Re:Results don't surprise me. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Which one is it? (Score:4, Interesting)
More calories or less?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction [wikipedia.org]
Calorie restriction refers to calories of food energy absorbed per day (rate of energy in). "Overweight" refers to accumulate body mass, in the form of fat (accumulation). You use fat at a rate determined by your physiology and physical activity (rate of energy out).
rate of energy in - rate of energy out = rate of accumulation
You can be fat and eat very few calories, or skinny and eat a lot of calories. If your rate in is equal to your rate out, you'll maintain your current weight, whatever that might be.
The study in TFA, however, is probably misleading to most of us because it's a critique of BMI, which only measures weight, not fat content. I know people who are very fit, not crazy body builders, and still considered overweight via BMI because they have too much muscle and not enough fat to match the index's expectations.
Re:Okay, noob question time (Score:5, Interesting)
Welcome to science, things change based on new information.
We get a hypothesis, test it, and if it tests out we have a generally accepted theory. That theory is subject to change, someone reads its comes up with a new hypothesis and runs some more tests.
The problem is that folks are making life-changing decisions based on these theories. Doctors yell at us. TV "educates" us about what is acceptable. Then, something new comes along and says 'forget all that stuff, do this instead'. Doesn't take long before folks tune it out altogether.
For me, it was salt. Loved it. The more the better. Then I read about how bad it is for your heart. So I cut it out dramatically. Then a couple years later, I read about how it isn't very bad at all, unless you already have a heart condition, or family history. So basically I got duped into giving up something I enjoyed. Makes me more skeptical about the next scientific finding about my diet.
And misinterpreation ensues... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:BMI Is not a Good Measure (Score:1, Interesting)
BMI is just stupid. It is based [famousbelgians.net] on the chest size of the 1800's Scottish army and the height of an average French conscript.
If you are a Scotsman who was drafted into the French army, it might just apply to you, though.
Re:Correlation =/= Causation. (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as you had food, water, and pr0n you could live forever on your computer chair.
Yeah, if you like bedsores [wikipedia.org] on your ass!
;)
There aren't enough details to decide but I could understand how being slightly overweight could be beneficial to women in particular. There's a reason why women like these [citizenarcane.com] and this [wikimedia.org] were considered the most attractive in antiquity. Chubby is coming back in style
Even today many guys like me prefer chubby women - they're softer to cuddle with, they tend to have bigger and more plump breasts, they're curvature is accentuated and their plumpness makes them look "cuter", they're better-equipped to have healthy babies, and (in my experience) they have more orgasms. The homos out there are aware of the popularity of "bears".
I'm glad that the starving, anorexic "heroin-chic" fad is going out the door. One can be fit and comfortable without having to go hungry or be unattractively obese. Vanity, like eating, is unattractive in excess.
Re:BMI Is not a Good Measure (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Okay, noob question time (Score:3, Interesting)
Heh, I just want to point out that without salt you would be dead. Back before it was easily available (which actually wasn't that long ago) salt was worth more than gold.
Salt is one of those things that has to be "just right". Not too much and not too little. The amount needed is different for everyone. Depends on how much you sweat, what you eat, your other electrolyte levels, if you are sick (fluid loss), etc. Tons of variables.
Personally I have to make sure I get enough salt, not too much. I make all my own food and have to make a conscious effort to add a little more salt than I would like. I have first hand experience of what happens when you don't get enough and it's very unpleasant.
Re:Okay, noob question time (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I read about how bad it is for your heart. So I cut it out dramatically. Then a couple years later, I read about how it isn't very bad at all...
In that case the problem isn't really the science, the problem is panic and making drastic decisions based on limited information.
The overall best advice for health has been moderation, its been that way for centuries:
- don't do too much hard work or you'll burn out and get injured
- don't sit around and do nothing, you need to move and use your body
- don't eat a lot of one thing, variety is good
- recognize things with negative effects and limit their use, if you ingest something that you react badly to, don't ingest it. More on this later
- remember that your body changes gradually. Pushing it too hard too fast, even in a healthy direction, is bad
- its YOUR body you have to take responsibility for it and understand what you do to it. If you don't entirely understand advice, ask more questions and do a bit of research and find out for yourself.
Identifying things with negative effects is what really gets people. Smoking is bad, your body coughing and having nic fits is a sign of distress. Having a few drinks and relaxing and laughing is good, being hungover is your body telling you "that was dumb, we're OK now but don't do it again".
Overeating and being dog tired isn't normal. Its OK once in a while, but usually you should be able to eat. Take a few minutes to let it all settle down, then have energy to go do stuff.
I guess the overall answer is to take unsolicited advice or to take drastic all-or-nothing actions with a GRAIN OF SALT (long setup on that one). Anyone suggesting that you radically alter your life in a short time span, is either taking urgent action to keep you from dying or full of shit and trying to gain power over you. I have a good relationship with my doctor and put him in the first category and most others in the latter. Even then, I make sure that the actions my doctor advises are backed up not just by the latest research, but solid foundations and long term common sense.
Re:Correlation =/= Causation. (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately neither one does a good job of separating visceral fat from subcutaneous fat, and that's more important than being a bit chubby. I do carry a fair bit of fat, but very little of it is visceral, and I'm still within about 5lbs of what's ideal for a person of my build.
The BMI demanded weight of about 170 would definitely be detrimental to my health. BTW, last time I weighed myself I was roughly 189 and 5' 10.5, I don't feel well when I have gotten down under 180.
Re:BMI Is not a Good Measure (Score:5, Interesting)
Crossfit type workouts can give a good measure of several metrics, but it isn't exactly easy to quantify.
I think what you refer to in your example is less a case of measuring fitness than it is measuring performance in some extremely specialized circumstances where the difference between first and last isn't all that much. Lance Armstrong wasn't a great runner despite being a great cyclist, but he is probably far better than most other non-runners. Just like Robbie McEwen can't match Armstrong in the Alps but would crush him in the last 100 meters of the flats.
When I was in the USMC we did a lot of 'fitness' stuff and everyone was more or less in pretty good shape. When I went to sniper school there were some physical requirements that were different and others that were under more scrutiny. That made obvious what were previously undetectable differences. Two guys could finish a run side by side but one of them would be so taxed he couldn't steady his rifle, despite both having first class PT scores. After I was discharged I worked more on strength than anything else and when I got back into competitive shooting I immediately noticed the difference. Hard to say which constitutes 'fitter', benching 325 or being able to march all day with a full pack and a 16 lb rifle.
They're asking the wrong questions, as usual. (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:But it's in CANADA (Score:5, Interesting)
Ummm (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I thought we already knew this (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Results don't surprise me. (Score:3, Interesting)
Naturally, humans don't live longer than it takes to raise offspring. It is our medicine and technology that enables us to do so.
The natural human lifespan, barring death by disease or violence, seems to be about the Biblical "threescore and ten." Sure, life expectancies used to be a lot shorter than that, but it's not like healthy people routinely dropped dead of heart attacks as soon as their kids were out of the house; people died young for specific reasons, and those who dodged the various bullets (or swords, or rocks ...) lived to what we'd consider a decent age even today. Since living past reproductive age is metabolically expensive, there has to be a reason for this. The hypothesis that having older humans (grandparents and great-grandparents) around confers a survival advantage on their descendants is as good an explanation as any.
Re:Correlation =/= Causation. (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing is, I totally agree with your point. The fashion industry has promoted an unhealthy ideal for decades. So why did you have to ruin your post with the homophobia? I'm not doubting that there are tons of gays in fashion, I'm just saying that it's a huge homophobic leap to go from that to "teh homogays made wimmen hate themselves".
The guy who discovered Twiggy, the stick-figure prototype of the modern model, was hetero enough to have two kids with her. I know that doesn't prove anything, but still... are you sure that you're not full of shit?
I think you're dying to wear your Peter Pan costume to work tomorrow. And you know what? I hope one day you do give yourself permission to be who you really are. I'll support you in that!
BMI is Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
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....
Did they control for sickness? Alcohol studies... (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:But it's in CANADA (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But it's in CANADA (Score:4, Interesting)
Canadians love to complain about our health care system, but the numbers show that it does very well compared to other systems.
The article you link to seems pretty shady. It's clearly looking for reasons why the US should not change their private health insurance model. The first paragraph talks about how Erbitux (cetuximab) "... targets cancer cells exclusively, unlike conventional chemotherapies that more crudely kill all fast-growing cells in the body" even though standard treatment with cetuximab is used in conjunction with chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy, in patients who do not respond to chemotherapy alone. Did she already fail a course of chemotherapy? She went to a cancer clinic in a foreign country (the US) and was surprised that it was hard to get reimbursed? Finally, cetuximab is only used in cases of colorectal cancer where there's EGFR expression. If her tumor was not this kind then treating her with cetuximab would indeed be unproven. It also appears that cetuximab has not yet completed it's phase III trials, which again makes it experimental. Nevertheless, it has been approved by Health Canada for patients who meet the criteria above.
You can read the Health Canada Summary Basis of Decision on cetuximab here: http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/dhp-mps/prodpharma/sbd-smd/phase1-decision/drug-med/sbd_smd_2007_erbitux_088225-eng.php [hc-sc.gc.ca]
Eating dietary fat does makes you fat, indirectly. (Score:2, Interesting)
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 [eurekalert.org]
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
Re:BMI is worthless (Score:3, Interesting)
BMI utterly breaks for anyone outside of "normal" height range (+/- about 1 stdev for men and women or about 5'4"-5'9" for men and maybe 5'2"-5'7" for women). If you look at the formula, it goes up as a square of height. That makes the "normal" BMI of anyone 6' or taller something around 170ish pounds. It tells me, that at 6'2" I should be 180 pounds max. This is insane. At 200 pounds I start to feel ribs poking through, and I feel like I'm starving all the time.
No, BMI should not be used as any kind of "magic indicator". Using it for studies like this will naturally show a bias for "slightly overweight" being healthier, because for maybe 20% of your *entire population* normal BMI is horridly underweight and unhealthy. Find a better system.