More on Weight, Disease and Longevity

The controversy over whether higher weight leads to increased disease and mortality is as confusing as the one over whether sugar is addictive or not. First we hear that obesity leads to poor health and premature death, then we hear that it doesn’t. All we can do is stay informed and pay attention to the results of reputable research studies. I offer the following information not to take sides in the debate, but in the hopes that you’ll take it in with self-compassion and use it to motivate yourself to become healthier. According to an article in the 3/13 Nutrition Action Health Letter, “Weighing the options: do extra pounds mean extra years,” a recent “fatter-people-live-longer” meta-analysis reported on in the Journal of the American Medical Association was so flawed as to make its results false—its numbers were skewed by including former smokers and people who were sick and it failed to look at different age ranges separately. The Health Letter article also maintains that the study (which evaluated other studies) left out some which would have proven their conclusion false, that is, there are many reputable, valid studies which do show that “people who are overweight have higher risks of dying than those in the lean group” but they were not included in the meta-analysis.  Why is this issue important? Although it’s true that you can be fit and fat, it’s equally true that many of you who carry more weight than you’d like ar...
Source: Normal Eating - Category: Eating Disorders Authors: Source Type: blogs