Tuesday, July 27, 2004
"Obesity epidemic" questioned
[Rosie Mestel, "Worth Its Weight in Debate," The Los Angeles Times, 23 July 2004.]
From the film "Supersize Me" to Tommy Thompson, Americans are inundated with discussions of how much they are overweight. Some are beginning to question the claims behind such scare tactics, and whether they are leading to healthy outcomes:
Two-thirds of us are now deemed overweight, with half of those classified as obese, according to the government. In March, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said obesity was killing at least 400,000 Americans a year, almost as many as the 435,000 death toll from tobacco.
Obesity skeptics say this is the latest in a long string of exaggerations.
"There's this tremendous cultural hysteria about this issue which is really not justified at all by the scientific and medical literature," said [Paul] Campos, a University of Colorado law professor and author of "The Obesity Myth." "P.T. Barnum — wherever he now may be — must be furious with the notion that he can't get in on this thing."
Campos and others contend that study after study — including those of 1.8 million Norwegians and 115,195 Massachusetts nurses — have found that people who were overweight had a lower risk of death than those who were lean. Some studies (such as one of 9,228 middle-aged and elderly Israeli men) have reported that people who intentionally lost weight died sooner than those who stayed fat.
Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity geneticist at Rockefeller University, said the apparent weight rise of Americans was in large part an illusion. Very fat people have certainly gotten a lot fatter, he said, presumably because their genes make them especially prone to gain weight in today's food- and leisure-rich environment. Nearly everyone else has stayed more or less the same, or gained just a few pounds.
The perceived national obesity crisis is actually a problem for a narrow group of people, he said. Targeting the entire population with an exercise-and-eat-less public health campaign won't solve the problem.
USC sociology professor Barry Glassner sees something familiar about the obesity epidemic he reads about daily. It reminds him of headlines about flesh-eating bacteria and satanic preschool molestation — topics explored in his 2000 book "The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things."
"From the hysteria from government officials and the media, one could easily get the impression that gaining a few pounds is the equivalent of taking up smoking or removing the seat belts from your car," he said.
The current obesity flap, he said, is one more example of what sociologists like to term a "moral panic." Obesity is the ghoul du jour — and predictably, our reaction is over the top.
What drives the skeptics craziest of all is what they term the tweaking of data to exaggerate the risks from extra weight. They say such shaky methodology pervades the body weight literature.
The most egregious recent example of this, they say, was the CDC's pronouncement in March that obesity was killing 400,000 Americans a year. The study, which was used in the kickoff of a federal anti-obesity campaign, came up with its estimate by taking the death risk of young people who were obese and applying it to the whole population.
But a variety of scientists, including some at the CDC itself, later took issue with the study. One of them, Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, said the methodology made no sense because the death risk from obesity for young people was known to be high, and the risk for the elderly was tiny. The result was a highly inflated death estimate.
Even with this abyss of disagreement there are some areas where both sides agree. Diets work very poorly: Most people can lose only about 10% of their body weight, and most tend to gain back their weight over time.
Exercise improves health, no matter what you weigh.
Steven Blair, president of the Cooper Institute, a nonprofit research and education foundation in Dallas, says exercise is by far the most important factor in long-term health. He has monitored thousands of men and women for decades — and showed that a person's performance on a treadmill test at the study's start was a better predictor of later health than was body weight.
"It's better to be fat and fit than be lean and unfit," he said.
[Rosie Mestel, "Worth Its Weight in Debate," The Los Angeles Times, 23 July 2004.]
From the film "Supersize Me" to Tommy Thompson, Americans are inundated with discussions of how much they are overweight. Some are beginning to question the claims behind such scare tactics, and whether they are leading to healthy outcomes:
Two-thirds of us are now deemed overweight, with half of those classified as obese, according to the government. In March, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said obesity was killing at least 400,000 Americans a year, almost as many as the 435,000 death toll from tobacco.
Obesity skeptics say this is the latest in a long string of exaggerations.
"There's this tremendous cultural hysteria about this issue which is really not justified at all by the scientific and medical literature," said [Paul] Campos, a University of Colorado law professor and author of "The Obesity Myth." "P.T. Barnum — wherever he now may be — must be furious with the notion that he can't get in on this thing."
Campos and others contend that study after study — including those of 1.8 million Norwegians and 115,195 Massachusetts nurses — have found that people who were overweight had a lower risk of death than those who were lean. Some studies (such as one of 9,228 middle-aged and elderly Israeli men) have reported that people who intentionally lost weight died sooner than those who stayed fat.
Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity geneticist at Rockefeller University, said the apparent weight rise of Americans was in large part an illusion. Very fat people have certainly gotten a lot fatter, he said, presumably because their genes make them especially prone to gain weight in today's food- and leisure-rich environment. Nearly everyone else has stayed more or less the same, or gained just a few pounds.
The perceived national obesity crisis is actually a problem for a narrow group of people, he said. Targeting the entire population with an exercise-and-eat-less public health campaign won't solve the problem.
USC sociology professor Barry Glassner sees something familiar about the obesity epidemic he reads about daily. It reminds him of headlines about flesh-eating bacteria and satanic preschool molestation — topics explored in his 2000 book "The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things."
"From the hysteria from government officials and the media, one could easily get the impression that gaining a few pounds is the equivalent of taking up smoking or removing the seat belts from your car," he said.
The current obesity flap, he said, is one more example of what sociologists like to term a "moral panic." Obesity is the ghoul du jour — and predictably, our reaction is over the top.
What drives the skeptics craziest of all is what they term the tweaking of data to exaggerate the risks from extra weight. They say such shaky methodology pervades the body weight literature.
The most egregious recent example of this, they say, was the CDC's pronouncement in March that obesity was killing 400,000 Americans a year. The study, which was used in the kickoff of a federal anti-obesity campaign, came up with its estimate by taking the death risk of young people who were obese and applying it to the whole population.
But a variety of scientists, including some at the CDC itself, later took issue with the study. One of them, Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, said the methodology made no sense because the death risk from obesity for young people was known to be high, and the risk for the elderly was tiny. The result was a highly inflated death estimate.
Even with this abyss of disagreement there are some areas where both sides agree. Diets work very poorly: Most people can lose only about 10% of their body weight, and most tend to gain back their weight over time.
Exercise improves health, no matter what you weigh.
Steven Blair, president of the Cooper Institute, a nonprofit research and education foundation in Dallas, says exercise is by far the most important factor in long-term health. He has monitored thousands of men and women for decades — and showed that a person's performance on a treadmill test at the study's start was a better predictor of later health than was body weight.
"It's better to be fat and fit than be lean and unfit," he said.
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