Really, kya ? I was just thinking the same thing about you, and how you’re using this thread to justify your own shitty attitudes regarding fat people. WHAT a coinkydink !!

Sorry, Amp. I know you can’t put out the fires of condescension with the gasoline of condescension, but I had I just couldn’t resist.

Kim, you wicked, wicked… uh, basement-dweller. A Size 18 ?! For shame !! Jane Seymour and that *Friends* babe took off lots of weight after having kids !! Why can’t you ?!

Got anything nice I can borrow ? :p

“For example, in the 25-59 year old group the confidence interval for increased risk for the obese with BMI’s up to 35 is 0.84-1.72, meaning that we can’t be confident that even for this group there is any increased risk of early death. The same is true for those with BMI’s up to 30. Moreover, the RR figure — the Relative Risk for dying from obesity - is, in the authors’ words, “in the range of 1-2.” This means that there is at the very best a very weak association — notice, not a causal connection — between obesity and death.”

Besides, even if there are health risks of being obese there are health benefits of being obese too that would be lost if people lost weight. The obese are less likely to have osteoperosis, bone fractures (which are deadly for the elderly) and various pulmonary diseases. Even if obesity is tied into heart disease, hypertension or diabetes (three of the main diseases associated with obesity) a high fiber diet and regular exercise should be enough to cut the risks from these diseases drastically. I was reading Gaesser’s book and he found that a healthy diet and regular exercise cut diabetes rates by 50% and hypertension rates by about 90% within a month.

Again though, what have you to gain by all of this? Where is the catch for you?

I remain confused, however, why folks like Kyan feel it necessary to attempt to preach, offer misleading or erroneous facts, and in general treat the issue with such blanketing generalities. What’s in it for you, Kyan, and why is it that you are bemused, befuddled and horrified that people aren’t willing to continue buying into the your line of thought? Personally I find your attitude far more unhealthy for heavy people than their weight - can you guess why that is?

And the fat kills crowd marches on. Little inconveniences about fat not killing are hardly going to take them off message.

Diabetes, heart disease, and obesity are all caused by poor diet and inactivity. It’s no surprise that you’d find all three in indigenous communities where starchy, fatty food is the most affordable thing to eat. That is not at all the same as the CDC’s admission that slight ‘overweight’ appears to have lower mortality rates than ‘normal weight.’

But now, I’m not bemused but quite horrified by the nature of the discussion taking place here. Much of what’s being expressed appears to me to be nothing more than self-justification based upon a series of news articles that misrepresented the original study.

Obesity is epidemic in indigenous communities (for instance) and there is much evidence that this is directly related to the epidemics of diabetes and heart disease that contribute to radical reductions in life expectancy in those communities. There is nothing special about indigenous communities beyond poverty, despair and cheap processed food.

While the study in question makes it clear that being overwieght (BMI

As for the CDC, I personally think they deserve alot of credit for going back and redesigning/reanylizing their studies and trying to get it right. They have long recognized that BMI is not the best way to go, but the other measures are either too expensive (such as CT scanning) or too phrenology-like (waist to hip ratios etc). I know alot of people think they have a hidden agenda, but this new release seems to me like they are headed on the right track to try to get a much better understanding of what the problem is (or if there really is one).

Its hardly comprable to “Y2K hysteria” to say that new approaches are needed. You suggest that I risk not being taken seriously because I’m “overdoing it”. So why are you advocating for a policy which his consistantly been shown to overreach, and overreach quite dramatically. They tell us weight loss works. It doesn’t. They say fat people are at grave risk, they aren’t. They insist on revising guidelines to increase those labeled as fat, but we now see those are the people with the least risk of all. When, exactly, do the fat attackers have to worry about “overdoing it”? Every time their suggestions have faced even the most mild scrutiny, it has failed to live up to its claims. We need a new approach.

All people need to be treated with dignity, meaning not being lectured about their weight. All people should be encouraged to eat a moderate diet and have moderate activity levels and to enjoy health at every size. It does no one any good to draw a line and decide who gets to be okay and who doesn’t. That’s what we’ve been doing, and it doesn’t work. The line always bleeds. First you focus on the people you deem “extremely” fat, but how long before things drift to those “at risk” of being “extremely fat”. How long before we expand those labeled “at risk” to include those deemed “pre-at risk”? I’d say not very long. Not because I’m cynic, but because we’ve been there already. Treatments which have never been shown to do anything to make people healthier, much less any thinner, have no place and no one should be shamed into accepting a system of failure. We need to change our approaches to encourage healthy living in a weight neutral perspective. People who are quite fat need support for that, without an obsessive and provenly counterproductive obsession with weight. Some may lose weight. Some may not. But we will all be better for it once we stop thinking a system which fails nearly 99 times out of 100 is somehow the way to go. Its doing all fat people a disservice, and I hardly think it wrong to say so.

To me, this says that there is an intrinsic danger to weight itself outside of eating behavior and fitness but that individuals have to be severally overweight for this to be true (they also note that the vast majority of the 111K excess deaths were from people with BMI’s greater than 35). I think an appropriate message is to stress the importance of healthy eating and exercise for everyone and only focus on weight loss for those who are extremely overweight.

Granting that the drug could kill and produced a nominal affect in weight loss, she still urged its approval on the basis that even such minor weight loss and such dangerous risks were outweighed by how impossibly deadly being fat was. Discovering that her premise is completely false puts her testimony (and indeed her entire profession) in an entirely new light. She’s got a lot of reason to refuse to believe the new data.

The entire hysteria over fat is shown to have no statistical basis? Well never mind that. We mustn’t lose sight of the epidemic we keep insisting is upon us. Fear morbid obesity! Can’t let the fact that its not really morbid at all get us off message.

This is something those directly involved in medicine have known for years and years. It’s criminal on the part of the medical establishment, IMO, that at this point in time we are still having to have these discussions.

So based on what might be clear health risks to a few people, the many are badgered into near hysteria because of what might be unrealistic assessments of what is a normal weight. On the other hand, the article also made clear that there may be potential health effects of being moderately overweight that are being masked because of medical intervention — in other words, the weight might be an issue, but it’s treatable.

Researchers had a full gamut of responses to the unexpected findings, being reported today in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Some saw the report as a long-needed reality check on what they consider the nation’s near-hysteria over fat.

“I love it,” said Dr. Steven Blair, president and chief executive of the Cooper Institute, a research and educational organization in Dallas that focuses on preventive medicine.

“There are people who have made up their minds that obesity and overweight are the biggest public health problem that we have to face,” Dr. Blair said. “These numbers show that maybe it’s not that big.”

Others simply did not believe the findings.

Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, which is affiliated with Harvard, pointed to the university’s own study of nurses that found mortality risks in being overweight and even greater risks in being obese. (That study involved mostly white women and used statistical methods different from those in the newly reported research.)

“We can’t afford to be complacent about the epidemic of obesity,” Dr. Manson said.

Yes, folks, we can’t believe a vigorously-researched, peer-reviewed study in JAMA because it involves fat people.

Indeed, subject to exceptions for the most extreme cases, it’s not at all clear that being overweight is an independent health risk of any kind, let alone something that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. While having a sedentary lifestyle or a lousy diet–both factors, of course, that can contribute to being overweight–do pose health risks, there’s virtually no evidence that being fat, in and of itself, is at all bad for you. In other words, while lifestyle is a good predictor of health, weight isn’t: A moderately active fat person is likely to be far healthier than someone who is svelte but sedentary. What’s worse, Americans’ (largely unsuccessful) efforts to make themselves thin through dieting and supplements are themselves a major cause of the ill health associated with being overweight–meaning that America’s war on fat is actually helping cause the very disease it is supposed to cure.