Brains of Overweight People Look Ten Years Older Than Those of Lean Peers, Says Report (theguardian.com) 184
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The brains of people who are obese or overweight appear to have aged an extra 10 years compared to their lean peers from middle age onwards, brain scanning research has revealed. The difference, scientists say, corresponds to a greater shrinkage in the volume of white matter, although they don't know the cause. It might be down to genes causing both brain-shrinking and obesity, or it could be that changes occurring in the brain lead to overeating. Either way, it does not appear to affect cognitive performance. White matter is tissue, composed of nerve fibers, that aids communication between different regions of the brain. The volume of white matter in a human brain increases during youth and then decreases with age for both lean people and those who are overweight or obese. But researchers have discovered that this shrinkage differs depending on a subject's BMI. "The overall message is that brains basically appear to be 10 years older if you are overweight or obese," said Lisa Ronan, first author of the study from the University of Cambridge. Despite a higher BMI being linked to a smaller volume of white matter, it did not appear to have any link to mental prowess, with no difference seen between lean and overweight or obese participants when they were subjected to IQ tests. Scientists from the University of Cambridge and Yale University have published their findings in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.
Wisdom of the elders (Score:5, Funny)
Well since you're supposed to get wiser with age, does this accelerate the wising-up process?
Re:Wisdom of the elders (Score:5, Informative)
As the article mentioned, they could not measure a difference in intellectual functioning, just a loss of white matter (nerve fibers) without a significant effect on cortex. They did not look at other brain structures, which are also involved in cognition. The loss of white matter may not relate directly to cognitive functioning because it can happen, for example, by a reduction in fiber thickness, without a loss of fiber number. Therefore, if being fatter affects nerve fiber diameter (or myelin sheath thickness) then this would show up as reduced white matter volume. But all the connections would still be there.
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I think this very well could be the result of less movement. So the brain's cognitive ability is maintained the same as not so fat people, but since they do not move as much, those parts of the brain atrophy.
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Gender as a social construct, ignoring millions of years of evolution into a bisexual species, is truly a delusion. Gender is a double bell curve function. The majority fall in the one sigma deviation of male and female. There are outlyers that are significantly in the minority with XXY or XYY genes (hyper-male and hyper-female). There is a more significant minority that express mixed gender markers. This is "intersexed" and can run a spectrum from a man with lactating teats, a woman with an exceed
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Well since you're supposed to get wiser with age, does this accelerate the wising-up process?
Just makes us wiseguys.
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Hence the expression wiseass? *ponders*
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There's still a bit of a selection process - the really dumb ones don't all survive that long.
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The only elders I have found to be wise were already pretty smart when they we much younger. There are plenty of elders out there who are the same dumbasses that they always have been.
That's what I've seen. You can be a geezer at any age.
And there seems to be a whole political party built from people who proudly say they haven't changed their opinion (learned anything new) in 40 years. That means those people know exactly the same stuff at age 60 that they "learned" at age 20.
Duh. (Score:1)
It's because we're thinking more, stupid skinny people! The summary stated there was no difference on IQ test scores, but you know who designed and administered those tests? SKINNY PEOPLE!
Actually, the truth is we spend those extra brain-years thinking about food, so...
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but you know who designed and administered those tests? SKINNY PEOPLE!
Not just skinny people, but liberal anti-gun, food and freedom hating skinny people!
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No one should be overreacting on this subject. On TFA, the researcher already stated that weight may not really be the cause (just a possibility and may need further research); thus, it is still inconclusive.
But, Ronan warns, it is not yet clear whether an increased BMI is driving the effect. “It could be that the genes that are responsible for obesity could also be responsible for smaller brains, or it could be that if you have a brain change that could lead to overeating,” she said.
Another researcher also confirmed that the result could be inconclusive.
Claudia Metzler-Baddeley, from Cardiff University’s Brain Research Imaging Centre, said the research backs up previous suggestions that obesity and brain structure are linked. But, she added, “It is cross-sectional study - so it is not following people up over time. That is always a limiting factor. It doesn’t allow you to make any inferences about cause and effect.” What’s more, she says, self-reports of health and lifestyle factors are prone to inaccuracies, while the use of BMI also has drawbacks. “You can have a very high BMI just simply because of high muscle mass,” she said.
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Interesting)
No one should be overreacting on this subject. On TFA, the researcher already stated that weight may not really be the cause (just a possibility and may need further research)
If there's a correlation it could be the other way around: perhaps people with those specific brain characteristics are prone to eating more.
Re:Duh. (bad science all around) (Score:2)
If there's a correlation it could be the other way around: perhaps people with those specific brain characteristics are prone to eating more.
Eating more does not make you fat. Period. Being overweight is due to an imbalance in how your body regulates fat storage due to hormonal regulation of homeostasis. The main driver of this process is insulin. Insulin is directly affected by WHAT you eat, now how much. And more precisely, it is the amount of carbs in your diet. Sugars are particularly nasty in this regard.
It's a lot more complex than this, but that is a sufficient summary of the basics. Overeating or sedentary behavior does NO
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Well... yes and no. 5000 calories is a lot, even in high-caloric foods. I think you would poop a lot and you wouldn't WANT to eat that much food because you wouldn't need to. The calorie argument is a red herring - it is a piece of information, but only a small one.
But I can tell you this. After eating high-fat (animal fats, butter, coconut oil, olive oil), no grains/legumes and virtually no sugar for a year, and not counting calories at all or exercising any more than I normally did, I lost 15 lbs and
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Watch this video by Dr Peter Attia on Vimeo who talks about how our Dietary Guidelines are what they are. I know.. it's long, but it's really interesting. He has some really deep info on his website about how our diet and fat affects our cholesterol. Another fun fact - high cholesterol isn't bad. Another fun fact - half of all people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol.
Peter Attia is an aggressive spokesperson for the meat industry whose primary means of persuasion is personally attacking other researchers. He exclusively fails to cite non-industry sponsored peer-reviewed scientific literature, and instead uses the tobacco-industry model of raising doubt to avoid the mountains of evidence and specific critiques that contradict his sales pitch. He's not a publishing scientists of any repute, and not someone you want to take health advice from. If your doctor wants you on a
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He is not a published scientist of any repute. There, I think I covered the facts of your response. He is a medical doctor. But there are lots of those, right? What he does well is encourage people to read the research, and to become critical thinkers.
Your post reeks of some vendetta against him. If I had to put money on it, I would guess you are a vegetarian/vegan.
Fine, you don't like him there are other doctors and researchers out there who are researching the same things, and he references them in w
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No one should be overreacting on this subject. On TFA, the researcher already stated that weight may not really be the cause (just a possibility and may need further research)
If there's a correlation it could be the other way around: perhaps people with those specific brain characteristics are prone to eating more.
Perhaps people with smaller brains eat just as much but burn less (the brain uses enormous amounts of energy).
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It's because we're thinking more, stupid skinny people!
Maybe skinny people are just thinking smarter, not harder.
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Actually, the truth is we spend those extra brain-years thinking about food, so...
Nope, we're obese, we spend those extra brain-years savoring the food.
Or... (Score:1, Flamebait)
...they don't know the cause. It might be down to genes causing both brain-shrinking and obesity, or it could be that changes occurring in the brain lead to overeating.
Or it could be that overconsumption, especially of certain nutrients like animal fats, processed meats or refined sugars, also leads to a decline in brain health and tissue-loss. There is in fact research which demonstrates that, eg eating animal fat has a direct impact on people's congnitive performance, and there is a large number of other studies that demonstrate similar effects. Sorry, no citations, but it should be easy enough to find these things on, say, https://www.sciencedaily.com/i... [sciencedaily.com]. As far as
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I'm skinny and eat fat food. My metabolic rate is very high, I eat a lot but can't gain weight.
Where does that put me?
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Those people who stay skinny have a genetic predisposition however if a person struggles to keep their weight down it is their fault for not working hard enough. Because you know Calories in vs Calories burned.
Now genetics is only part of the equation. there are thing you can do to put on weight (say weight lifting) or loose weight (sat cardio and diet)
There are too many diet snobs out there telling you that everything you eat is bad. Just as your genetics may make your body digest faster and slower peopl
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Switching diet entirely and quickly often leaves undesirable results.
A lot of digestion occurs as a result of the bacterial flora, which needs time to adjust to a new diet.
Meaning, if you want to try a vegetarian diet, it's wiser to go slowly.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Informative)
Having lost 150lbs over the past few years, I have read innumerable articles over that time about nutrition and have come to a conclusion: Nobody has any fucking idea what they're talking about. Carbs are bad for you, fat is bad for you, refined sugar is bad for you, all sugar is bad for you, processed food of any kind is bad for you, artificial sweeteners are bad for you, and on and on. I can find an article and a study to back up just about any claim you care to make about nutrition. It's all bullshit pseudo science.
Here's the consensus: Burn more calories than you consume and you will lose weight, and try to eat some vegetables every once in a while to ensure you get some vitamins. That's about it.
If you're having trouble gaining weight, you're not eating enough. Simple as that. Here's what you do: Eat what you normally would every day, then eat an entire loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter every night. That's an extra 10000 Calories or so every day. If you can't gain weight on that then you're a medical marvel or an Olympiad in training. Will it be hard to force yourself to eat all that? You bet it will. It's at least as hard for people on the opposite end of the spectrum who have to force themselves not to eat, trust me. So it's really just a matter of how bad you want it, isn't it?
Re:Or... (Score:5, Informative)
That's what I concluded from years of following discussions, and I never even tried to start any fad diet.
The one thing I started with after reducing my working days to just a few hours was only eat when I'm really hungry.
Not when I feel peckish or something looks good. No, my stomach gives a clear signal that the body needs food and then I eat. And with just a little restraint at first and stop eating when I feel full enough, my portions became automatically smaller.
Since the start of the year I've gone down from 110kg to hitting 96kg on the scale as of last week. With the increased energy I also did a bit more weightlifting.
Even my girl who's overweight has followed my lead and only started eating when really hungry has lost 4 to 5 kg in just over 1 month (with light exercise). She now has more energy and feels much better.
Re:Or... (Score:4, Insightful)
This. There are several insights I've found useful for keeping my weight down:
(1) Learn to recognize the difference between hunger and craving. When one's body seems to "be trying" to get back to your set-point weight, you'll be hit with all kinds of cravings that are unaccompanied by hunger. It takes less discipline to ignore cravings than to ignore the cravings+hunger.
(2) Keep a mental tally of (approximately) how many calories you've eaten so far in the day, vs. how active you have been / will be. It helps you decide if it's worth eating food ${X} or doing activity ${Y}.
(3) Poor sleep ==> { extra appetite, worse self-control, and less desire to get exercise }. So place a high premium on good sleep.
(4) Carbs seem to be somewhat addictive, in terms of cravings. In my experience, it takes ~ 1-2 months of not eating a lot of carbs in order for the cravings to go away.
(5) If I'm hungry, or even have cravings for fattening foods, it's better to eat something filling (meat, yogurt, etc.) rather than let myself get so hungry / craving that I say "screw it" and make brownies.
(6) For some reason, people who eat a lot of yogurt seem to be skinny. Correlation isn't causation, but it's perhaps a sign of it. So consider eating more yogurt. IMHO the yucky low-fat stuff with aspartame isn't worth it; just get something really yummy like Liberte and accept the calories as a worthwhile investment.
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Actually, speaking for myself only, I've found the opposite to be true.
The only way I've avoided falling off the wagon, so to speak, is to have a policy of simply never eating sweats. Even when I'm making a dessert for other people and need to taste-test it, I spit rather than swallow. (Sorry, hard to avoid the pun-fodder on that one.)
When I've tried to simply be moderate in how often I eat sweets, I've always ended eating them more and more frequently, until I was effectively eating them whenever I felt
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Also, it seems to take a little bit of time before you start to feel full, even if you've eaten enough food to make you full. Eating slower helps you stop eating before you get too stuffed. Drinking water with meals also helps you get the "full" feeling before you're painfully over-full.
I don't have any weight problems, but I absolutely hate the feeling of being over-full. I noticed that I'm way more likely to have it happen if I eat very quickly.
With the increased energy I also did a bit more weightlifting.
Building muscle burns energy, but even just having more muscl
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It's all bullshit pseudo science. That's what I concluded from years of following discussions, and I never even tried to start any fad diet.
This stuff isn't magic or unknown. Long established science.
Hormones, hormones, hormones. "Nutritionists" claim all sorts of crap but endocrinologists, at least the good ones, know that there is a vast amount of actual science on mammalian metabolism. A good book [amazon.com]
To say "Calories = calories" is flat wrong. Attention! Automobile analogy coming: Your car will run differently on gasoline vs diesel vs nitro-methane. No one with an I.Q. in the upper two digits or better would claim that they all have the same
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And on occasion I don't feel hungry until late in the afternoon or early evening, so then I've only eaten once during the day.
So, timing is pretty regular, and it fits most of the time with respect to lunch hour at the office and the end of the day.
As with everything, you take small steps to enable your body to get used to it, and just in case hunger strikes at the wron
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Thanks for the most insightful post on Slashdot on this matter ever. Damn that I don't have any modpoints to give you. The only reason that "don't eat fat" or "don't eat carbs" work is because they make people eat less, i.e if you skip carbs then there is a lot of calories on a lunch plate that you suddenly don't eat anymore. Also if you skip fat or carbs you automatically don't eat a lot of the junk food. Myself I started to calculate calories and so far have lost 180lbs.
While that is true, one of the things that is a marker of healthy aging is higher than average insulin sensitivity, which a certain number of general things are known about:
1- Centenarians consistently have excellent insulin sensitivity, resulting in lower heart disease, cancer and chronic degenerative brain disorder numbers.
2- One way of improving insulin sensitivity is to lower carbohydrate intake in relation to total calories, for some this works for others it needs to be balanced by exercise.
3- Ketogeni
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Also, with carbs, it's really easy to underestimate the calorie content. It doesn't seem right that a lean chicken patty can easily contain fewer calories than the bun you put it in.
I've found that when I look at a meal and think to myself "What can I take away that will remove a significant number of calories, but reduce my enjoyment of the meal as little as possible", I almost always come to the conclusion that taking the high-carb portion out works out best. Fats my be calorie dense, but 35 calories of b
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You can reduce your blood pressure by reducing salt
That's not even universally true. Some people are sensitive to salt intake and an increase in blood pressure. For others, the kidneys flush the extra salts right out - even at a high weight.
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A friend of mine suffered from low blood pressure, sufficiently low to be a problem. She started going heavy on the salt, in the hope of raising it. She said people would walk over to her table at restaurants to tell her not to use so much salt. (This was in the 90s.)
Re:Or... (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's the consensus: Burn more calories than you consume and you will lose weight, and try to eat some vegetables every once in a while to ensure you get some vitamins. That's about it.
Even this is a little bullshit. I lost 100 pounds last year and I had similar experiences to yours. My weight has now been stable for about eight months. This year, I suffered an injury which changed my routine, causing me to burn about 7000 fewer calories per week than my pre-injury routine (I was completely bedridden). With my reduced calorie burn and no significant changes in intake, I lost about five pounds in a few weeks. Here I am six weeks later, and the weight loss was real and permanent. This weight loss completely baffles me and can't be explained by my mental model of weight management.
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This year, I suffered an injury which changed my routine, causing me to burn about 7000 fewer calories per week than my pre-injury routine (I was completely bedridden). With my reduced calorie burn and no significant changes in intake, I lost about five pounds in a few weeks.
Healing takes more energy than you might think. Stress too, if you were particularly stressed about it (during stress, the body can either accumulate -reserves in case it lasts-, or on the contrary dissipate energy -make available, thus leading to elimination if not needed on the short term).
Plus it was only a week, so as your weight had been stabilized for some time, your body tends to try to keep some balance, and didn't store much of the surplus (it's not a process as basic and systematic as some Slashdo
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Healing takes more energy than you might think.
Yea, that's my guess
Stress too, if you were particularly stressed about it (during stress, the body can either accumulate -reserves in case it lasts-, or on the contrary dissipate energy -make available, thus leading to elimination if not needed on the short term).
Doubt it. I'm not the kind of person that suffers from stress.
Plus it was only a week, so as your weight had been stabilized for some time, your body tends to try to keep some balance, and didn't store much of the surplus (it's not a process as basic and systematic as some Slashdotters want to believe, although it sure is the most important point to weight loss, in most cases).
Your digestion efficiency might have been affected by your injury too (down to diarrhea).
And finally, some drugs you might have taken, can also affect both weight gain and weight loss.
Wasn't diarrhea, because that's water weight and would come back a few days after getting healthy. It wasn't just for a week, I didn't walk for three weeks and got off crutches after four and a half. The only drug I was on was Hydrocodone, and that was only for about five days.
I absolutely lost muscle mass, but I'm back to my pre-injury strength and five pounds are still missing. I'm thin enough that losing five pounds of lean
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If you're having trouble gaining weight, you're not eating enough. Simple as that.
I'm not even trying to gain weight. I'm skinny but healthy. My father was skinny, my grandfather was skinny (well one of the two), both his parents were skinny.
Also if you binge you might gain weight but it might come with a plethora of other afflictions, because you're forcing your body into a place it wouldn't naturally fit.
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Having lost 150lbs over the past few years, I have read innumerable articles over that time about nutrition and have come to a conclusion: Nobody has any fucking idea what they're talking about. Carbs are bad for you, fat is bad for you, refined sugar is bad for you, all sugar is bad for you, processed food of any kind is bad for you, artificial sweeteners are bad for you, and on and on. I can find an article and a study to back up just about any claim you care to make about nutrition. It's all bullshit pseudo science.
Here's the consensus: Burn more calories than you consume and you will lose weight, and try to eat some vegetables every once in a while to ensure you get some vitamins. That's about it.
If you're having trouble gaining weight, you're not eating enough. Simple as that. Here's what you do: Eat what you normally would every day, then eat an entire loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter every night. That's an extra 10000 Calories or so every day. If you can't gain weight on that then you're a medical marvel or an Olympiad in training. Will it be hard to force yourself to eat all that? You bet it will. It's at least as hard for people on the opposite end of the spectrum who have to force themselves not to eat, trust me. So it's really just a matter of how bad you want it, isn't it?
You are wrong on some points. There are NOT studies that back up some of your assertions (i.e. fat is bad for you). People have selectively interpreted results to fit their own opinions, and in some cases outright lied about them. IT IS NOT ABOUT CALORIES IN / CALORIES OUT.
Eating more does not make you fat. Period. Being overweight is due to an imbalance in how your body regulates fat storage due to hormonal regulation of homeostasis. The main driver of this process is insulin. Insulin is directly affect
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Before you start a diet like that you should talk to your doctor have your cholesterol, CMP/BMP, and whatever other tests they may think necessary checked and a long talk about eating habits. There may be a lot of contributing factors that make dieting difficult or not work but you won't know unless you check.
I've had that conversation with my doctor before and found that a lot of the foods I like that I thought were really bad weren't as bad as I thought.
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It puts you in the "I hate your guts you skinny show-off" category.
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I'm skinny and eat fat food. My metabolic rate is very high, I eat a lot but can't gain weight.
Where does that put me?
Who knows? I used to be the same, but as I grew older, my metabolic rate fell, and I now have to eat far less, to avoid putting on weight. On the plus side, it is not all that difficult to change one's eating habits - I have gone from eating lots of meat and hating vegetables, to actually preferring vegetables and finding meat somewhat off-putting. It's just what you get used to, I guess.
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Let's see...
Today I started with yogurt and fruits as breakfast at around 9 AM. About 18 ounces of it. Pure yogurt, 5% fat and fresh fruits, the mix was home made, so no extra sugar was added. At about 10:30 AM I had half a melon, that was about 4.4 pounds, was fairly sweet but it's mostly water anyway. At noon (12:30 to be more precise) I had some uncooked dried thin sausages (3.5 ounces) with fried potatoes (10.5 ounces roughly) and buffalo sour cream (which is fatter than cow sour cream). On top of that
Re:Or... (Score:4, Informative)
Since they said specifically that there seemed to be no differences in cognitive performance between the skinny subjects and the fat ones, this is unlikely to be the cause of the difference.
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Since they said specifically that there seemed to be no differences in cognitive performance between the skinny subjects and the fat ones, this is unlikely to be the cause of the difference.
I think you may have mis-read my comments. I am not saying that "fat people are dumb", which is what several seem to taken offence by. But there is research (look it up, if you doubt me) which suggests that several ingredients in our modern diet have a negative impact on our brain function. Like for example studies that seem to show a connection between the risk of developing Alzheimer and consumption of a suger-rich diet. You have to keep in mind that these effects are subtle; it's not like eating a Mars b
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Which is irrelevant to the cause/effect that they saw.
Their effect did NOT include a relative decline in cognitive ability, which was specifically stated. If the effect they were observing were caused by the cause you describe, it WOULD have shown a decline in cognitive function.
So, no cognitive difference between the two groups implies strongly a different cause than the one you're describing, which DOES cause a decline in cognitive ability.
Note, by the by, that this in no way implies that your dietary
Re:Or... (Score:5, Interesting)
Your claim of lower cognitive performance due to diet choices is not related to the premature aging the scientists found.
My guess is that the brain matter loss has more to do with the sedentary life style which often goes along with obesity. Lack of exercise, watching too much TV, etc.
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There is also science that suggests Low Carb and higher Fat diets are better. Insulin and Insulin resistance seem to be (for some) the primary factors in plaquing and heart disease. BMI is not the leading indicator.
Links to scientific studies (not blog posts - real studies) http://2ketodudes.com/#science [2ketodudes.com]
So --- what is the truth? dunno. But it seems this may all be an up and coming topic for researchers to figure out. Keto is 180 from conventional message - but seems to be working for many. Every
Starving is good? (Score:2)
There's been a lot of research (particularly on mice [wikipedia.org]) which shows that _limited_ starving will increase the life expectancy of the test animals, right?
This looks like one possible factor in the explanation for that effect.
Terje
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Sure, but who wants to get old just to torture himself?
Re:Starving is good? (Score:4, Insightful)
More aptly, who wants to torture themselves just to get old.
Re:Starving is good? (Score:5, Funny)
Like in the old joke:
Doc, what do I have to do to get old?
You smoke?
Nope
You drink?
Nope
You sleeping around?
Nope
Then why the hell you wanna get old?
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The oldest man alive is a 112 year old Israeli, Auschwitz survivor called Yisrael Kristal. He survived the death camp weighing just 37 Kg. I read an interview about him where he claimed he never ate much, he said something like "eating is overrated".
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Caloric restriction [wikipedia.org]?
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Sure, but who wants to get old just to torture himself?
Insightful question. If somehow it was found out that eating only tofurkey demonstrably added 10 years to a person's lifespan, I'd opt for eating what I do now, and gladly give up those years. Especially since those years are added to the old age part of life.
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Insightful question. If somehow it was found out that eating only tofurkey demonstrably added 10 years to a person's lifespan, I'd opt for eating what I do now, and gladly give up those years. Especially since those years are added to the old age part of life.
What if they could show that avoiding animal products would not only extend your life, but would significantly improve your quality of life as well? Like not getting colon, liver, lung, or prostate cancer? That usually changes people's perspective, esp
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Also, I'm a vegan don't know of any other vegans who stay on fake meat for more than a year or so as they transition. I completely agree with you though, that stuff is nasty.
Quick Question - Do you eat Seitan? I wish I knew about it when I tried vegetarianism.
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Quick Question - Do you eat Seitan? I wish I knew about it when I tried vegetarianism.
Yes, but I generally eat more tempeh. Great stuff once you learn a few ways to prepare it.
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The problem with such studies on mice is that rodents have an extremely high risk of getting cancer. Since the mutation that causes a cell to be a cancer cell happens when a cell divides you get a far less chance of cancer if you minimize the division of your cells. With limited starving the body does not spend energy on rebuilding new muscle protein and so on so you get a lower cell division rate. For rodents where the risk of cancer is so high this could play a major factor and thus the mice with limited
Wait a sec... (Score:5, Funny)
BMI != obesity (Score:1, Insightful)
It was never meant to be such. Fit athletes can have a high BMI, it's mass (muscle is heavier than fat) against height.
Emphasis mine.
From CDC.
Re:BMI != obesity (Score:5, Informative)
Re:BMI != obesity (Score:5, Insightful)
When looking at an entire populate, the very muscular athletes are outliers. High BMI almost always indicates obesity.
Except on slashdot. You see on any youth thread we complain about how all the millennials think they are special snowflakes. But on BMI threads, everyone with an obese level BMI is one of the few special snowflakes for whom the prediction is not accurate.
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Notable researchers and organizations agree BMI is useless.
And the first link has this as the first line of the abstract:
"Body mass index (BMI) has various deficiencies as a measure of obesity, especially when the BMI measure is based on self-reported height and weight."
Note the bit about relying on people to tell the truth?
You can have 2 people, identical height, same actual body fat, and one will be obese according to BMI merely because they are large framed and heavily boned vs the other being small fram
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BMI sucks per nih.gov as well.
From the article you linked:
A BMI ⥠30 had a high specificity (95% in men and 99% in women), but a poor sensitivity (36% and 49 %, respectively) to detect BF %-defined obesity.
A diagnostic tool with a 95 to 99% specificity (that means if it says you're obese, it's wrong 1-5% of the time) does not by any measure "suck". If anything that paper points out that if BMI says you're obese, chances are that it's right, and if it says you're not, well, you might well be obese
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Wow, you can't even read what you, yourself wrote:
quote:
BMI-defined obesity ( 30 kg/m2) ... A BMI 30 had a high specificity (95% in men and 99% in women)
It's astonishing that you'll dismiss a diagnostic technique with such high specificity as "useless". The statistics for an awful lot of techniques are way, way lower than that in medicine, but no one dismisses them as useless, because no one thinks that a case of streptococcus somehow reflects on them as a person.
There's some shocking variations and misses
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I had a longer reply, but let's get down to the fundamentals:
You lack an understanding of exactly what was stated. BMI doesn't predict body fat percentages anymore than IQ predicts success.
You quoted me some numbers. Let's accept them.
Pick a member of the population at random.
Now guess whether they're successful. What percentage of the time will you be correct?
Now I tell you their IQ, or, if you prefer, I tell you their IQ is below 90. You now have an option to modify your guess. What percentage of the tim
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Then lets pick...
Well done, you've discovered conditional independence. if you like, you can argue in the ace of the entire wold of machine learning that conditional independences make things "useless".
In fact, the BMI number should be more of an asymmetric bell curve with regards to height and breadth and shifted by age.
It isn't symetric, the numbers in are more or less bell curves, the calculation is nonlinear and...
But then it no longer is as simple to condemn a person as obese ...ah and now we get down
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Merely using it to prove that BMI is nothing more than a fitted set of statistics to a specific population.
Yep. Crudely speaking that's what machine learning is. What passes for machine learning these days is usually much more complex, but ultimately you fit a model to a bunch of labelled data and use that to make predictions on new data.
As such, it doesn't mean much unless it is used within a similar population.
That I suppose depends on how representative the population is. The link we've been sharing qu
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It was never meant to be such.
BMI is a 95% accurate predictor of obesity in men and 99% in women. IOW if you pick a random member of the population, measure their BMI and body fat percentage 95-99% that BMI says you're obese, the fat percentage will agree (and also BMI will miss quite a few). And bear in mind of those 5% wrong, some number will be merely overweight rather than obese. So if you take an obese BMI to mean "should I lose weight", if it says "yes" it's going to be wrong way under 5% of the time.
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BMI is a 95% accurate predictor of obesity in men and 99% in women. IOW if you pick a random member of the population, measure their BMI and body fat percentage 95-99% that BMI says you're obese, the fat percentage will agree (and also BMI will miss quite a few). And bear in mind of those 5% wrong, some number will be merely overweight rather than obese. So if you take an obese BMI to mean "should I lose weight", if it says "yes" it's going to be wrong way under 5% of the time.
That's pretty bloody good.
I have no idea where you get your supposed 95% figure. Actual studies tend to show that the BMI cutoffs for obesity are only accurate for somewhere between 50% and 80% of people. Errors are usually large in both ways in most studies (i.e., errors that misclassify obese people as not obese, or the reverse). Usually the error is larger in misclassifying obese people as merely overweight... though I recall a study which said if we lowered the BMI "obese" threshold to capture at least 95% of actual obese peo
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The study was on obese people. (Score:1)
Overweight people fared just fine, and other studies show they live longer than underweight people. Perhaps it would be worth another look at just what is defined as "overweight"?
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Studies still show lower quality of life in old age for people who are overweight (or more specifically, obese - not just morbidly so, but regular old obesity) in middle age. Overweight people fared "just fine" in limited studies of overall longevity, which are heavily complicated by conflation with the chronic underweight status typical of people with severe long-term or terminal illness.
The overweight people were better off in aggregate than, say, the skinny people dying of cancer or suffering through che
Caloric Restriction? (Score:3)
This doesn't seem out of line with other studies [wisc.edu] that link a more restricted caloric intake with youthfulness and better health.
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This doesn't seem out of line with other studies [wisc.edu] that link a more restricted caloric intake with youthfulness and better health.
This is great when the goal is to be the most youthful, and healthy person in the graveyard.
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Usually when people make comments like yours, they're rationalizing their poor life choices to themselves. Embrace the bacon and live happy, or clean up your eating habits and get to the gym.
Or experience. Most of our lifespan is based on genetics. I've seen people like my Mother in law, non smoker, non drinker get good exercise, and she died at 78 after 8 years of dementia in a nursing home. The men in my family from way back, tend to die at around 85, excluding those killed by accident or war. From great great relations, to modern day, when with exercise, excellent health care and maintenance meds, we still die at 85.
It's obvious that completely sedentary lifestyles and completely off the
Pick Your Poison - (Score:3, Interesting)
From The Guardian:
Underweight people face significantly higher risk of dementia, study suggests
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/10/underweight-people-face-significantly-higher-risk-of-dementia-study-suggests
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Research involving health records of 2 million people condradicts current thinking, sparking surprise among authors and health experts
It has been wrongly claimed that obese people have a higher risk of dementia, say the authors from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
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Underweight people face significantly higher risk of dementia, study suggests
Well that should be plainly obvious. You need cholesterol to protect the brain. You need to eat fats to produce the cholesterol. It shouldn't surprise anyone - especially experts.
So basically... (Score:1)
What they are saying is: "You also look terrible on the inside... fatty."
Brains of Overweight People Look Ten Years Older T (Score:1)
Depression and memory problems (Score:3)
Just because your IQ is not impacted doesn't mean the white matter doesn't serve other purposes.
I am currently trying to exercise and radically changed my diet. It is because exercise has as much if not more impact on depression than anti depressants according to studies! When you exercise, go on a ketone diet, or take anti depressants your body creates BDNF. BDNF causes neurons to grow more synapses and dendrites to repair the brain.
Fat and sediment people have shrunken Hippo Thalamus which controls mode, executive functions, and short term memory.
So yes as people as some people pointed out people become wiser, but many who for example who were once sharp programmers end up in management as their is cognitive decline and a difficulty learning new things.
Do the math... (Score:2)
Cost of living is going up, cost of health care, often more important in senior years is up, Pensions are a thing of the past, 401Ks are getting destroyed by the stock market, and Social Security is on life support and probably won;t even be there ianymore in 10-20 years. Who wants to keep living at that point....
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That is sad, usually it was the fat kids who were smart and good at math...
I'm not fat..! (Score:2)
Meh... (Score:2)
Because I was born overweight, looked like the poster child for mongolism, and had a undiagnosed hearing lost in one ear, the school system classified me as being mentally retarded. Every year for eight years, I had annual evaluations of my mental abilities and consistently scored on the genius side of the scale. The evaluators were consistently surprised by the results but always called it as a "statistical fluke". I graduated the eighth grade with a college-level reading comprehension level and fifth grad
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Lose some weight or you won't make it to 50.
That's funny. I've been told I wouldn't live until I was 10-, 20-, 30-, 40-years-old.
Here's the secrets of longevity: don't believe the critics and take care of your body.
the money shot (Score:2)
...buried deep in the summary:
"...it did not appear to have any link to mental prowess, with no difference seen between lean and overweight or obese participants..."
Note also that there is growing evidence that being a little overweight (not morbidly obese, mind you) is actually beneficial to your survival going into mid- and later-old-age, particularly if you have certain diseases (specifically, cancer).
Research (Score:2)
Obviously this doesn't mean there is no correlation, it just means that this further step (def
Re:Alcohol (Score:4, Funny)
I'm already on it - no need to nag!
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His Haiku was very lame
He is a douchebag.