Fat heaven? Fat chance!
A NYT article says that being overweight actually lives longer than people with normal weights.
It being sort of a humor piece written by someone (I suspect) with dubious medical credential and equally dubious pink shirt/tie combo, I decided to google for the medical journals referred to.
Candidate 1 says that the number of deaths due to overweight is actually lower than estimated, a far cry from the conclusions drawn by the happy fatty.
Candidate 2 seems more plausible. It says that being underweight and obese is associated with increased mortality, and though it says that being merely overweight is not associated with increased mortality, from the numbers it looks like it actually has lower mortality compared with normal weight. Though honestly, I don't really know what the numbers mean precisely.
Imprecisely, I think the results mean that, out of all the people who died and whose BMI data is available, there are more obsese and underweight deaths than normal weight deaths, but there are less overweight deaths than normal weight deaths.
I think it's save to say that's not the same thing as overweight causing longevity.
1 Comments:
Maybe it's because fat people don't engage in as many high-risk behaviors. Or rather, they just don't engage in as many active behaviors period, and are less likely to end up in a non-health related death, like a car accident or a failed chute deployment on a base jump.
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