Word: weights
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...obesity epidemic, Campos argues, amounts to a relatively small across-the-board weight gain pushing large numbers of people from the top of the ideal-weight category into overweight, and from the top of overweight into obese-subtle shifts, in other words, rather than alarming spikes. Support for that view can be found in creeping mean BMI readings for New Zealand men: they've gone from 25.5 in 1977 to 26.9 in 2003. The starting point for overweight used to be 27, until health authorities-following the W.H.O.'s lead-lowered it in the late 1990s...
...consensus among obesity researchers is that people began getting heavier in the 1970s and have continued to do so. While skeptics don't dispute this, they say that if the extra weight is a problem, it should be reflected in rising death rates from cardiovascular disease. In fact, the opposite has occurred. In March, a month after launching a $A6 million advertising campaign aimed at getting kids to be more active and saying, "obesity is a very serious problem in our society ... obviously it leads to cardiovascular disease," Australia's Minister for Health and Ageing Tony Abbott told a National...
...What's happened, most doctors would say, is that better treatment, broader use of drugs for prevention, as well as less cigarette smoking, mean that despite rising average weight, fewer people are dying from cardiovascular disease. This is small cause for celebration, says Sydney University's Booth. "People who are overweight are more likely to suffer serious, debilitating, chronic diseases before they actually die. We've become quite good at keeping people alive in the presence of these diseases, but they have a really poor life in the meantime, and that doesn't show up in studies like Flegal...
...Bombarded by doomsday obesity messages, however, people may expect that, sooner or later, the trend of rising weight will start chipping into average life expectancy. But here's another evidentiary problem for those beating the obesity drum: life expectancy in Australia is slated to go on increasing for at least another half-century. According to ABS projections, an average 50-year-old in 2051 will live to age 87; an average woman to 89. These represent increases of six and 4.5 years respectively on projections for the current crop of 50-year-olds. So how should we reconcile apparently being...
...vacuum," says The George Institute's MacMahon, professor of cardiovascular medicine and epidemiology at the University of Sydney. "Your risk of having a heart attack is very, very multidimensional. Obesity is a causal contributor, but it's one of many. And it's actually much harder to reduce weight than it is to lower blood pressure or cholesterol. Fundamentally, all these risk factors multiply one another, so if you can't turn one down, you turn others in the chain and you end up with the same sort of result." If you must fret about one risk factor, adds George...