Conventional Wisdom

Conventional Wisdom Unconventional Challenges Steven A. Shaw steven@fat-guy.com

conventional wisdom unconventional challenge Americans don’t exercise enough. Americans exercise too much.

By BILL PENNINGTON; April 16, 2006 Baby Boomers Stay Active,and So Do Their Doctors . . . a legion of running, swimming and biking boomers are flouting the conventional limits of the middle-aged body's abilities, and filling the nation’s operating rooms and orthopedists’ offices in the process. They need knee and hip replacements, surgery for cartilage and ligament damage, and treatment for tendinitis, arthritis, bursitis and stress fractures. The phenomenon even has a name in medical circles: boomeritis. LINK

By JANE E. BRODY; August 9, 2005 Fit Is One Thing; Obsessive Exercise Is Another Excessive exercise can damage tendons, ligaments, bones, cartilage, joints and muscles and not give minor injuries a chance to heal. Instead of building muscle, too much exercise can lead to muscle breakdown. Girls and young women may stop menstruating and start losing bone, as if they were in menopause. Excessive exercise can also release loads of free radicals, which can cause mutations and may increase cancer risk. LINK

conventional wisdom unconventional challenge Being overweight is bad for you. Being overweight is good for you.

By GINA KOLATA; April 20, 2005 Some Extra Heft May Be Helpful, New Study Says People who are overweight but not obese have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight, federal researchers are reporting today. . . . . . And being very thin, even though the thinness was longstanding and unlikely to stem from disease, caused a slight increase in the risk of death, the researchers said. LINK

By GINA KOLATA; April 20, 2005 Some Extra Heft May Be Helpful, New Study Says Some Extra Heft May Be Helpful, New Study Says People who are overweight but not obese have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight, federal researchers are reporting today. . . . . . And being very thin, even though the thinness was longstanding and unlikely to stem from disease, caused a slight increase in the risk of death, the researchers said. The new study comes just 13 months after different researchers from the disease control centers published a paper warning that obesity and overweight were causing an extra 400,000 deaths . . . . . Now the new study says that obesity and extreme obesity are causing about 112,000 extra deaths but that overweight is preventing about 86,000, leaving a net toll of some 26,000 deaths in all three categories combined, compared with the 34,000 extra deaths found in those who are underweight. LINK

By ERIC NAGOURNEY; May 9, 2006 Heavy People May Beat Critical Illness More Often Writing in Critical Care Medicine, the researchers report what happened when they looked at the body mass indexes of more than 1,000 intensive care unit patients and then looked at how well the patients ended up doing. “Lower B.M.I.’s were associated with higher odds of death, whereas overweight and obese B.M.I.’s were associated with lower odds,” the researchers wrote. LINK

conventional wisdom unconventional challenge Obesity is a character flaw. Obesity is genetic.

By GINA KOLATA; May 8, 2007 Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside . . . Dr. Stunkard published another study in The New England Journal of Medicine, using another classic method of geneticists: investigating twins. . . . . . The identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether they had been reared apart or together. LINK

By GINA KOLATA; June 8, 2004 I BEG TO DIFFER; The Fat Epidemic: He Says It’s an Illusion Over the years, Dr. Friedman says, he has watched the scientific data accumulate to show that body weight, in animals and humans, is not under conscious control. Body weight, he says, is genetically determined, as tightly regulated as height. Genes control not only how much you eat but also the metabolic rate at which you burn food. When it comes to eating, free will is an illusion. LINK

By GINA KOLATA; August 29, 2007 For the Overweight, Bad Advice by the Spoonful Scientists now believe that each individual has a genetically determined weight range spanning perhaps 30 pounds. Those who force their weight below nature’s preassigned levels become hungrier and eat more; several studies also show that their metabolisms slow in a variety of ways as the body tries to conserve energy and regain weight. People trying to exceed their weight range face the opposite situation: eating becomes unappealing, and their metabolisms shift into high gear. LINK

conventional wisdom unconventional challenge Americans are getting fatter. Americans are getting stronger.

By GINA KOLATA; July 30, 2006 So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You . . . one of the most striking shifts in human existence—a change from small, relatively weak and sickly people to humans who are so big and robust that their ancestors seem almost unrecognizable. New research from around the world has begun to reveal a picture of humans today that is so different from what it was in the past that scientists say they are startled. LINK

By ABBY ELLIN; December 28, 2006 Quick, Do You Know Your B.M.I.? The index also didn’t distinguish between body fat and muscle mass, so athletes and bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose rating was 33 when he was Mr. Universe, were technically obese. That struck some people as odd. Such discrepancies got experts wondering how accurately the index gauges health. Others questioned the reliability of the index because the figure doesn’t take fitness into account. LINK

By GINA KOLATA; June 8, 2004 I BEG TO DIFFER; The Fat Epidemic: He Says It’s an Illusion As a result, the curve of body weight has been pulled slightly to the right, with more people shifting up a few pounds to cross the line that experts use to divide normal from obese. In 1991, 23 percent of Americans fell into the obese category; now 31 percent do, a more than 30 percent increase. But the average weight of the population has increased by just 7 to 10 pounds since 1991. LINK

conventional wisdom unconventional challenge There’s anepidemic of diabetes. There’s anepidemic of diagnosis.

By GINA KOLATA; August 20, 2007 An Increase in Diagnoses May Not Mean a Higher Rate of the Disease, a Survey Shows Their surprising conclusion, said Katherine M. Flegal, an author of the paper and an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics, was that the overall age-adjusted proportion of the population that has diabetes had not really changed from 1988 to 2002, the most recent year for which federal data are available. LINK

conventional wisdom unconventional challenge Thin is beautiful. Thin is ugly!

By SHARON LaFRANIERE; July 4, 2007 In Mauritania, Seeking to End an Overfed Ideal . . . the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, the mirror opposite of the West on questions of women’s weight. To men here, fat is sexy... For decades, the Mauritanian version of a Western teenager’s crash diet was a crash feeding program, devised to create girls obese enough to display family wealth and epitomize the Mauritanian ideal . . . Girls as young as 5 and as old as 19 had to drink up to five gallons of fat–rich camel’s or cow’s milk daily, aiming for silvery stretch marks on their upper arms. LINK

conventional wisdom unconventional challenge If we eat less fat we’ll be healthier. If we eat less fat we’ll be miserable.

By GARY TAUBES; July 7, 2002 What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie? “For a large percentage of the population, perhaps 30 to 40 percent, low-fat diets are counterproductive,” says Eleftheria Maratos–Flier, director of obesity research at Harvard’s prestigious Joslin Diabetes Center. “They have the paradoxical effect of making people gain weight.” LINK

By GINA KOLATA; February 14, 2006 Maybe You’re Not What You Eat . . . the Women’s Health Initiative, a study financed by the National Institutes of Health comparing low fat to regular diets. Eight years later, the women who reduced dietary fat had the same rates of colon cancer, breast cancer and heart disease as those whose diets were unchanged. They also weighed about the same and had no difference in diabetes rates, or in levels of insulin or blood sugar. LINK

By GINA KOLATA; May 8, 2007 Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside The Rockefeller researchers explained their observations in one of their papers: “It is entirely possible that weight reduction, instead of resulting in a normal state for obese patients, results in an abnormal state resembling that of starved nonobese individuals.” LINK

By GINA KOLATA; August 29, 2007 For the Overweight, Bad Advice by the Spoonful . . . the notion that Americans ever ate well is suspect. In 1966, when Americans were still comparatively thin, more than two billion hamburgers already had been sold in McDonald’s restaurants, noted Dr. Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California. . . . . . “The meals we romanticize in the past somehow leave out the reality of what people were eating,” he said. “The average meal had whole milk and ended with pie . . . The typical meal had plenty of fat and calories.” LINK

By NATALIE ANGIER; August 7, 2007 Its Poor Reputation Aside, Our Fat Is Doing Us a Favor Indeed, evolutionary biologists have proposed that our relative plumpness compared with our closest nonhuman kin, the chimpanzee, may help explain our relative braininess. LINK

By NATALIE ANGIER; August 7, 2007 Its Poor Reputation Aside, Our Fat Is Doing Us a Favor Its Poor Reputation Aside, Our Fat Is Doing Us a Favor Indeed, evolutionary biologists have proposed that our relative plumpness compared with our closest nonhuman kin, the chimpanzee, may help explain our relative braininess. In this country, the most popular cosmetic surgery procedure is liposuction: doctors vacuum out something like two million pounds of fat from the thighs, bellies, buttocks, jowls and man–breasts of 325,000 people a year. LINK

What we thought we knew Americans don’t exercise enough.Being overweight is bad for you.Obesity is a character flaw.Americans are getting fatter.There’s an epidemic of diabetes.Thin is beautiful.If we eat less fat we’ll be healthier.

What we know now Americans exercise too much.Being overweight is good for you.Obesity is genetic.Americans are getting stronger.There’s an epidemic of diagnosis.Thin is ugly.If we eat less fat we’ll be miserable. Americans don’t exercise enough.Being overweight is bad for you.Obesity is a character flaw.Americans are getting fatter.There’s an epidemic of diabetes.Thin is beautiful.If we eat less fat we’ll be healthier.

Conventional Wisdom T H A N K Y O U ! Conventional Wisdom Unconventional Challenges Unconventional Challenges Steven A. Shaw steven@fat-guy.com

Conventional Wisdom