Word: weights
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...fervor by epidemiologists, skeptics and sundry others, it points out the arbitrary nature of the BMI classifications, throws doubt on attempts to link high BMI and premature death, asks who stands to gain from the fanning of obesity fears, and questions the value of hounding populations to lose weight. "In general, we just don't know what the long-term consequences of rising obesity are going to be," says N.S.W. academic Michael Gard, coauthor with Jan Wright of The Obesity Epidemic: Science Morality and Ideology (2005). "But is it the looming, drop-everything health catastrophe that we're told...
...being called a disease? Here, many analysts see the fingerprints of the pharmaceutical industry, which worldwide has more than 20 weight-loss drugs in clinical trials and another 30 in the pipeline. But more on that-and obesity's links to illness-later...
...groups' different BMI classifications put them at equal risk of early death. But that's not the case. Indeed, there's compelling evidence that those defined as overweight (with a BMI between 25 and 29.9) are no more likely to die prematurely than people of ideal weight...
...studies conducted between 1976 and 2000, controlling for factors such as smoking, age, race and alcohol consumption. They found that while obesity caused about 112,000 deaths a year, being overweight prevented about 86,000 deaths annually. Based on those figures, the net U.S. death toll attributable to excess weight is 26,000 a year (about one-twelfth the figure that many obesity experts had been fond of quoting). But this was more than canceled out by the 34,000 deaths that researchers linked to being underweight-having a BMI lower than 18.5. What to make of pudginess appearing...
...book The Obesity Myth was published in 2004. The Flegal study, he says, confirmed at least two of his firmly held views: that the BMI's overweight category is meaningless and that you see a significant increase in the risk of premature death only at the two extremes of weight distribution. "The vast majority of people who are being judged as weighing too much by public health authorities throughout the Western world are at a weight where there isn't even a correlation with increased health risk, let alone a causal relationship," says Campos. The notion that overweight and obesity...