Can being a little bit overweight possibly be better for your health than maintaining "normal" weight?
Many doctors and obesity researchers would say no, but one persistent researcher has done a series of studies suggesting the opposite is true: A little extra weight might reduce the chance of dying.
Virginia Hughes tackles this complicated issue in a piece in Nature, where she writes that the epidemiology is complex, and the cofounding factors are difficult to eliminate. And the message to the public coming out of all of this is perhaps most complicated of all.
The researcher challenging the orthodoxy is Katherine Flegal of the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the CDC. Her latest study, published in January, found that "people deemed 'overweight' by international standards were 6% less likely to die than were those of 'normal' weight over the same time period," Hughes reports. Walter Willett at Harvard, a researcher largely responsible for establishing the dogma that thinner is better, tells Hughes, "“This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it.”
This is not an easy story to write. I took a crack at it for Scientific American in 2007, where I reported on some of Flegal's earlier studies. From that perspective, I think Hughes has done a nice job of stating the arguments on both sides of this controversy.
She doesn't resolve it; Willett and Flegal are like Capt. Kirk and [unnamed Star Trek villain for those who haven't seen the movie], who will go on battling as long as they can raise money for another movie (or study). Hughes concludes her piece with thoughts on the difficulty of trying to explain the subtleties of weight gain and mortality to a public that has been whipsawed by conflicting pronouncements.
She gives Flegal the last word, with what I have to believe is a disingenuous comment. Flegal's data, she tells Hughes, are “not intended to have a message.”
Nice try on Flegal's part. If the data didn't have a message, we would never have heard of her.
-Paul Raeburn
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