Hits & Misses #3 – 2009/6/23
Survey: Half can't find heart on body diagram. Nearly 70 percent can't correctly identify the shape of the lungs.
Study: Consumers underestimate calories in fast foods by 900 per week [gated, but with abstract].
Health Care Policy and Reform Insights | NCPA
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Recognition and Awards
The Japanese study that found chubby people outlive skinny people reminds me of an earlier study that found people who attend church regularly live longer than those who do not. This sounds evocative until you consider that people in failing health are frail and may not have the strength to attend church. In this regard regular church attendance is a proxy for health status. Likewise, weight loss and being extremely underweight can be thought of as a proxy for frailty or failing health.
Glad to see a study favorable to chubbiness. But can we generalize from the Japanese to everyone else?
Let’s not forget the rat studies — showing that substntially reduced intake of food prolonged life.
The study supposedly corrects for smoking and health status. But still it’s only showing correlation and not causation. The same as most such studies. That said, what’s the ideal BMI? Above or below 25?
Nobody knows what the ideal BMI is. That said, this finding that chubbiness is associated with lower morbidity and mortality is not an isolated one. For example, overweight and obese patients on dialysis and with heart failure appear to have better survival rates. However, obesity may also reduce one’s odds of surviving certain medical procedures so the answer, as the researchers say, is not clear.
To add to the confusion, in the US, the distribution of weight for children apparently stablized after 2003/2004. Whatever the cause of the shift was, it doesn’t appear to have been fast food or vending machine snacks in schools.
And yet, we take it seriously when they survey the same people about the so-called “public option”, or whether they think insurers should be forbidden from charging higher premiums or excluding “pre-existing conditions” (i.e. selling actual insurance), or whether they’d pay an extra $500 a year in taxes to “cover every American” (although it would cost a multiple of that to even approach “universal” coverage to the standard we have today).