Hi! I have a PhD in biochemistry... B)
I've been doing a lot of digging over the last few months... I'm putting together a series of articles that are aimed to blow the lid on the whole fat=unhealthy myth... why is it taking me a while? because I'm actually digging deep enough as to read the original papers referenced in articles where I can and to cross check them with other research from other independent institutions (i.e. peer revue - an esssential part of science)
I'm aware that for some folks here at least some of this is old news, but hopefully this will reach some people that could benefit from hearing it....
here's the germ of the first article I'm putting together.... (I posted this over in FF a couple weeks back, but was hanging fire while I built up the rest of the articles before bringing it over to Dims, but hell, it's summer, I'm busy and unlikely to get it finished in a while so let's at least get started...) :
Stop feeling guilty for loving/being fat folks! The balance of *reputable* research shows dieting/weightloss is BAD for health!
Two independent studies, in two different countries, both by reputable institutions and covering thousands of subjects suggest that dieting causes physiological damage that in the long term can outweigh the benefits!
'"Healthy overweight or obese subjects who try to lose weight and succeed in doing so over a six-year period suffer from almost double the risk of dying during the next 18 years compared with subjects who do not try to lose weight and whose weight remains stable," said Dr Sorensen.'
The studies were carried out by:
1- Institute of Preventive Medicine at Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark and followed 2,957 overweight or obese people in Finland who had been screened to ensure they had no underlying illnesses.
2- US National Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion in Atlanta.
which followed 6,391 overweight or obese people for nine years and found that those who had no intention of losing weight and even gained weight were least at risk of dying young.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...enews.research
Here's another good article backing that up
"Over the past 20 years, more than two dozen studies have found that weight losses of 20 to 30 pounds (between nine and 13 kilos) - the amount most dieters say they want to lose - lead to an increased risk of premature mortality. During the same period, only four studies have found that losing weight increases life expectancy."
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.p.../article/2997/
with sources listed at the bottom
so if all that media guff about diet, diet, diet is wrong - what's the route to living healthy for big folks?
One very promising approach is called Health At Every Size
there's a book of the same name by Linda Bacon Phd of University of California, Davis (no her name's not a joke! lol!)
The book is based on solid scientific study:
Bacon, L, VanLoan M , Stern JS, Keim N. Size Acceptance and Intuitive Eating Improves Health for Obese Female Chronic Dieters. Journal of American Dietetic Association. 2005;105:929-936.
demonstrating measurable health improvements in women who did NOT lose weight (but increased activity, raised esteem) contrasted with dieters!
http://www.lindabacon.org/HAESbook/
http://www.lindabacon.org/resources.html
http://nutrition.ucdavis.edu/faculty/bacon.html
Basically if you're active, practice "intuitive eating" and are as happy as you can manage (i.e. blow off all the negative anti-fat stigma that comes your way and build strong self-esteem) then that'll help keep you about as healthy as you can be!
So no need to feel guilty for being FA anymore! (if you ever did) And no need if you're a big person to put up with anymore rubbish about "but it's your health I'm worried for.." Hit them! Hit them with the BIG STICK OF SCIENCE! B)
Here's the stub of my second article
"Over"weight people live longest of all BMI categories i.e. the BMI categories are incorrectly assigned! The "overweight" category of people experienced negative excess mortality - in laymans terms on average they lived even longer than the "normal" category. Whilst "under"weight and "obese" categories of people "experienced excess mortality" compared with the "normal" category - the differences in relative risk were modest.
I crunched the numbers and they came out as the following extra, absolute risk of death expressed as a percentage over the 20year period of the study/ies
- "under"weight = an extra 1.4% chance compared to normal weight category
- "over" weight = 3.7% LESS chance compared to normal weight category
- "obese" = an extra 4.8% chance compared to normal weight category
and even given this modest increase in risk for "obese" folks - almost all (19/20) of that increased risk fell in the BMI greater than 35 category..
This came from a review by Flegal et al in 2005 of the stats from huge USA-wide NHANES I - III using the BMI categories established in '98 which are still (unfortunately) in wide use today...
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/293/15/1861
this was backed up by a more recent study in Japan, although the data from this one goes further still - suggesting that being underweight was worse for your longeivity than being obese
http://www.enotalone.com/article/19692.html
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/well...0618-cm13.html
"Researchers studied the health of about 50,000 people aged 40 or older over a 12-year period. They looked at the past physiques of the participants and how long they lived past the age of 40, and grouped them according to their body mass index (BMI), an indicator of how fat a person is.
After a thorough analysis, the experts were able to find that male participants with regular weight (with BMI within a normal range between 18.5 and 25) at the age of 40 years, lived for an additional average of 39.94 years, while those individuals who were considered overweight (BMI of between 25 and 30) at the age of 40 lived 41.64 years more. Women, whose weight was considered as normal, were found to live on average for a further 47.97 years, when compared with chubby women-who lived another 48.05 years, according to the study.
Furthermore, the study showed that men and women with obesity (BMI of 30 or more), lived an additional 39.41 and 46.02 years, respectively. But skinny men (BMI of less than 18.5) were on average found to live 34.54 more years, and thin women another 41.79 years."
What I want to draw your attention to here is how close the figures for normal/overweight and obese are! In fact only the "skinny" diverge by greater than 2 years!
There's much, much more to it than that, but I'll post that up as and when it's organised and coherent and I've had chance to read and critique the references... (It's like my bloody thesis all over again! aaaargh!)
But I have to say that on balance what I've read so far on a whole lot of other issues besides just mortality leads me to lean towards the following:
1- the terms "overweight" and "obesity" are spurious "medicalisations" of body types/sizes better described as chubby and fat respectively... (of course it doesn't sound so scary then)
1a - if medics are going to use BMI the categories need redefining... certainly "overweight" should be included in the normal range (big pharma would not be happy with that!)
2- that the vast majority of diseases linked by medics/pharma/media with obesity are, when we contrast with societies where obesity is esteemed, actually linked with stress derived from social stigma
(so let's fight social stigma!)
3- one exception to the above would be diabetes II but in that instance it seems that there is an association rather than a causal link established... (chicken and egg... if you are wet, is it because you fell in the water or did you fall in the water cos you are wet?)
4- while fat, middling and thin people sadly all get ill and will all die one day; the illnesses they suffer and what they die of may vary and there may be some association with body type, for instance fat people might be more likely to have heart attacks but they are also more likely to recover from them and from bypass surgery than thin people (who are more likely to die from their first attack)... while fat people may be more likely to get some cancers, they are less likely to get other cancers and tend to have a higher survival rate going through the rigours of chemo c.f. thin people... (people are different one from another! it's biology!)
5- the odds of you finding fair, balanced and informed reporting of the actual science in the mainstream media are vanishingly small - on the whole what you get spoonfed are the recommendations of lobbyist pressure groups regurgitated through politicians....
6 - the whole fat-is-bad mythos is so hard to uproot from the mass psyche for exactly the same reasons that in the Dark Ages people thought the world was flat! Humans are programmed to look for the easy answer that presents itself most immediately to their eyes/perceptive filters!
i.e. i) fat person dies - doctor/witness "Must be his fat! case closed!" thin person dies "OMG! what can have happened! Quick autopsy him!"
i.e. ii) You don't get reliable data if you already have your conclusion! It skews your methods!
Once I've properly read/critiqued all the relevant research and written an more deeply informed review I'll be reposting here (among other places) with references...
Do have a dig / read / inwardly digest the refs. here...
Any other similar refs do give us a shout!
I've been doing a lot of digging over the last few months... I'm putting together a series of articles that are aimed to blow the lid on the whole fat=unhealthy myth... why is it taking me a while? because I'm actually digging deep enough as to read the original papers referenced in articles where I can and to cross check them with other research from other independent institutions (i.e. peer revue - an esssential part of science)
I'm aware that for some folks here at least some of this is old news, but hopefully this will reach some people that could benefit from hearing it....
here's the germ of the first article I'm putting together.... (I posted this over in FF a couple weeks back, but was hanging fire while I built up the rest of the articles before bringing it over to Dims, but hell, it's summer, I'm busy and unlikely to get it finished in a while so let's at least get started...) :
Stop feeling guilty for loving/being fat folks! The balance of *reputable* research shows dieting/weightloss is BAD for health!
Two independent studies, in two different countries, both by reputable institutions and covering thousands of subjects suggest that dieting causes physiological damage that in the long term can outweigh the benefits!
'"Healthy overweight or obese subjects who try to lose weight and succeed in doing so over a six-year period suffer from almost double the risk of dying during the next 18 years compared with subjects who do not try to lose weight and whose weight remains stable," said Dr Sorensen.'
The studies were carried out by:
1- Institute of Preventive Medicine at Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark and followed 2,957 overweight or obese people in Finland who had been screened to ensure they had no underlying illnesses.
2- US National Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion in Atlanta.
which followed 6,391 overweight or obese people for nine years and found that those who had no intention of losing weight and even gained weight were least at risk of dying young.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...enews.research
Here's another good article backing that up
"Over the past 20 years, more than two dozen studies have found that weight losses of 20 to 30 pounds (between nine and 13 kilos) - the amount most dieters say they want to lose - lead to an increased risk of premature mortality. During the same period, only four studies have found that losing weight increases life expectancy."
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.p.../article/2997/
with sources listed at the bottom
so if all that media guff about diet, diet, diet is wrong - what's the route to living healthy for big folks?
One very promising approach is called Health At Every Size
there's a book of the same name by Linda Bacon Phd of University of California, Davis (no her name's not a joke! lol!)
The book is based on solid scientific study:
Bacon, L, VanLoan M , Stern JS, Keim N. Size Acceptance and Intuitive Eating Improves Health for Obese Female Chronic Dieters. Journal of American Dietetic Association. 2005;105:929-936.
demonstrating measurable health improvements in women who did NOT lose weight (but increased activity, raised esteem) contrasted with dieters!
http://www.lindabacon.org/HAESbook/
http://www.lindabacon.org/resources.html
http://nutrition.ucdavis.edu/faculty/bacon.html
Basically if you're active, practice "intuitive eating" and are as happy as you can manage (i.e. blow off all the negative anti-fat stigma that comes your way and build strong self-esteem) then that'll help keep you about as healthy as you can be!
So no need to feel guilty for being FA anymore! (if you ever did) And no need if you're a big person to put up with anymore rubbish about "but it's your health I'm worried for.." Hit them! Hit them with the BIG STICK OF SCIENCE! B)
Here's the stub of my second article
"Over"weight people live longest of all BMI categories i.e. the BMI categories are incorrectly assigned! The "overweight" category of people experienced negative excess mortality - in laymans terms on average they lived even longer than the "normal" category. Whilst "under"weight and "obese" categories of people "experienced excess mortality" compared with the "normal" category - the differences in relative risk were modest.
I crunched the numbers and they came out as the following extra, absolute risk of death expressed as a percentage over the 20year period of the study/ies
- "under"weight = an extra 1.4% chance compared to normal weight category
- "over" weight = 3.7% LESS chance compared to normal weight category
- "obese" = an extra 4.8% chance compared to normal weight category
and even given this modest increase in risk for "obese" folks - almost all (19/20) of that increased risk fell in the BMI greater than 35 category..
This came from a review by Flegal et al in 2005 of the stats from huge USA-wide NHANES I - III using the BMI categories established in '98 which are still (unfortunately) in wide use today...
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/293/15/1861
this was backed up by a more recent study in Japan, although the data from this one goes further still - suggesting that being underweight was worse for your longeivity than being obese
http://www.enotalone.com/article/19692.html
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/well...0618-cm13.html
"Researchers studied the health of about 50,000 people aged 40 or older over a 12-year period. They looked at the past physiques of the participants and how long they lived past the age of 40, and grouped them according to their body mass index (BMI), an indicator of how fat a person is.
After a thorough analysis, the experts were able to find that male participants with regular weight (with BMI within a normal range between 18.5 and 25) at the age of 40 years, lived for an additional average of 39.94 years, while those individuals who were considered overweight (BMI of between 25 and 30) at the age of 40 lived 41.64 years more. Women, whose weight was considered as normal, were found to live on average for a further 47.97 years, when compared with chubby women-who lived another 48.05 years, according to the study.
Furthermore, the study showed that men and women with obesity (BMI of 30 or more), lived an additional 39.41 and 46.02 years, respectively. But skinny men (BMI of less than 18.5) were on average found to live 34.54 more years, and thin women another 41.79 years."
What I want to draw your attention to here is how close the figures for normal/overweight and obese are! In fact only the "skinny" diverge by greater than 2 years!
There's much, much more to it than that, but I'll post that up as and when it's organised and coherent and I've had chance to read and critique the references... (It's like my bloody thesis all over again! aaaargh!)
But I have to say that on balance what I've read so far on a whole lot of other issues besides just mortality leads me to lean towards the following:
1- the terms "overweight" and "obesity" are spurious "medicalisations" of body types/sizes better described as chubby and fat respectively... (of course it doesn't sound so scary then)
1a - if medics are going to use BMI the categories need redefining... certainly "overweight" should be included in the normal range (big pharma would not be happy with that!)
2- that the vast majority of diseases linked by medics/pharma/media with obesity are, when we contrast with societies where obesity is esteemed, actually linked with stress derived from social stigma
(so let's fight social stigma!)
3- one exception to the above would be diabetes II but in that instance it seems that there is an association rather than a causal link established... (chicken and egg... if you are wet, is it because you fell in the water or did you fall in the water cos you are wet?)
4- while fat, middling and thin people sadly all get ill and will all die one day; the illnesses they suffer and what they die of may vary and there may be some association with body type, for instance fat people might be more likely to have heart attacks but they are also more likely to recover from them and from bypass surgery than thin people (who are more likely to die from their first attack)... while fat people may be more likely to get some cancers, they are less likely to get other cancers and tend to have a higher survival rate going through the rigours of chemo c.f. thin people... (people are different one from another! it's biology!)
5- the odds of you finding fair, balanced and informed reporting of the actual science in the mainstream media are vanishingly small - on the whole what you get spoonfed are the recommendations of lobbyist pressure groups regurgitated through politicians....
6 - the whole fat-is-bad mythos is so hard to uproot from the mass psyche for exactly the same reasons that in the Dark Ages people thought the world was flat! Humans are programmed to look for the easy answer that presents itself most immediately to their eyes/perceptive filters!
i.e. i) fat person dies - doctor/witness "Must be his fat! case closed!" thin person dies "OMG! what can have happened! Quick autopsy him!"
i.e. ii) You don't get reliable data if you already have your conclusion! It skews your methods!
Once I've properly read/critiqued all the relevant research and written an more deeply informed review I'll be reposting here (among other places) with references...
Do have a dig / read / inwardly digest the refs. here...
Any other similar refs do give us a shout!
