In an article I read recently, I noticed this:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
On the relatively rare occasions when a study does go on long enough to track mortality, the findings frequently upend those of the shorter studies. (For example, though the vast majority of studies of overweight individuals link excess weight to ill health, the longest of them havent convincingly shown that overweight people are likely to die sooner, and a few of them have seemingly demonstrated that moderately overweight people are likely to live longer.) And these problems are aside from ubiquitous measurement errors (for example, people habitually misreport their diets in studies), routine misanalysis (researchers rely on complex software capable of juggling results in ways they dont always understand), and the less common, but serious, problem of outright fraud (which has been revealed, in confidential surveys, to be much more widespread than scientists like to acknowledge).
Does anyone have any information on this?
That extremely obese people die earlier I can believe, but frankly it seems odd to me that skinny people are believed to live longer, since people naturally put on more weight as they age, and tend to appear visually less healthy when they are both old and slender. Usually I trust my senses to tell me when, for example, food is off or someone is sick, so I really wonder about this researcher's claim that some studies find that moderately overweight people live longer.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
On the relatively rare occasions when a study does go on long enough to track mortality, the findings frequently upend those of the shorter studies. (For example, though the vast majority of studies of overweight individuals link excess weight to ill health, the longest of them havent convincingly shown that overweight people are likely to die sooner, and a few of them have seemingly demonstrated that moderately overweight people are likely to live longer.) And these problems are aside from ubiquitous measurement errors (for example, people habitually misreport their diets in studies), routine misanalysis (researchers rely on complex software capable of juggling results in ways they dont always understand), and the less common, but serious, problem of outright fraud (which has been revealed, in confidential surveys, to be much more widespread than scientists like to acknowledge).
Does anyone have any information on this?
That extremely obese people die earlier I can believe, but frankly it seems odd to me that skinny people are believed to live longer, since people naturally put on more weight as they age, and tend to appear visually less healthy when they are both old and slender. Usually I trust my senses to tell me when, for example, food is off or someone is sick, so I really wonder about this researcher's claim that some studies find that moderately overweight people live longer.
