Scare Tactics, Yet Again

So, we got up on Wednesday morning and what, other than election results in Alaska, greeted us as we read our morning paper? The latest study claiming that, as SFGate.com phrased it, "Early Death Only a Belt Hole Away". How does that feel, for all of us who are fat and all of us who love somebody who is fat?

I've been reading these studies for decades, at first with a sucker's personal interest and eventually with a critical mind. Let's think about this. The conventional wisdom is that obesity leads to an early death. We have more obese people today than ever before in the history of the human race -- not only are there more fat people, but individuals are fatter than ever before. And we can see, from the falling life expectancy that fat kills. Except that, life expectancy isn't falling. While obesity has overtaken up to 60 percent of the population, life expectancy has gone from 49 to 77 years. An increase of 57 percent.

As I read the article, I noticed a couple of things. And, shall we be surprised by what I noticed? First off, the study is being touted by the Obesity Society. Heard of them? Well, they aren't a society of the obese. No, they are a group of professionals in the field of obesity management. In other words, folk who pocket part of the $33 billion per annum paid out by people like me in the hope that they will get thin. Secondly, it is being challenged by a number of professionals who don't profit from this population, including Dr. Glenn Gaesser, the obesity expert who wrote "Big Fat Lies", a debunking of many of the myths around weight; Dr. Gaesser says that the study is "just adding to the obesity hysteria".

So, I looked a little further and found this Campos: Weight Study's Data Tortured by Paul Campos

Paul Campos is the author of The Obesity Myth, and in writing his article went to the New England Journal of Medicine and actually read the study. Here is part of what he has to say about it.

This, at last, produced a (modest) increase in mortality risk associated with "overweight," thus allowing the authors to draw their conclusion that "overweight is associated with an increased risk of death."

But notice how this result was produced. Since the "overweight" people in the study still had the lowest death risk, even after the authors tossed out 70 percent of their subject pool by limiting their analysis to never-smokers, the study found "overweight" associated with an increased risk of death only among a particular subgroup: people who had been "overweight" at age 50, but were at a "normal weight" when they later entered the study.

In other words, what the study really found is that, for middle-aged "overweight" people, weight loss increases the risk of death significantly! (This, by the way, is a very common finding in studies of this sort).

The authors, needless to say, fail to note this awkward fact, which does not merely contradict, but actually inverts, the public health message their study is intended to bolster. Will journalists covering the study manage to figure this out on their own? Fat chance.

Are you seeing what I'm seeing? That, if people who are currently 50 or over and are overweight believe this "study" and lose weight, they will actually increase their risk of death significantly. And that the authors of the study obviously know that (in order to explain away the fact that their own results showed fat people living longer than thin ones, they had to decide that the thin ones were dying of smoking related causes and so eliminated 70 percent of their original subjects whether their deaths were smoking related or not) and still publicize their results in a way that endangers fat people. And although our society is significantly biased against fat people and doesn't hesitate to heap scorn upon us, this is not being done because of that. No, it is being done for the same reason that the tobacco companies hid their research that tobacco was both deadly and addictive for 50 years and marketed to children. The same reason the diet industry ignores the research that shows that one of the major causes of weight gain is dieting and continues to sell diet products and services, knowing the result will be an increase in weight in 98 percent of their customers. Where there is a profit to be made, it is really not important that you might make people worse or kill them. And if you have to convince children to smoke or constantly redefine overweight downward to replace your lost customer base, well that's what you do. Nothing personal, you understand, just business.