Adult Obesity Prevalence Nearly Matches Heart Disease Deaths [OC]Submitted by orgborger t3_124sau9 in dataisbeautiful
internetcivilian t1_je11yuw wrote
Reply to comment by Marksd9 in Adult Obesity Prevalence Nearly Matches Heart Disease Deaths [OC] by orgborger
Oh I'd be happy to explain! The thing here is that 1 and 3 are true statements stitched together in a misleading way.
The assumption that I'm making but not proving is that poor diet and sedentary lifestyle contribute to negative health outcomes. Furthermore, excess body fat is strongly associated to said poor diet and sedentary lifestyle (lots of calories, few nutrients in proportion to those calories, no burning off of said calories through exercise). I see this as invalidating 4, but of course I would need to provide papers showing the correlation and I'm going to be lazy and just state that these papers exist. Wikipedia has some OK links to said papers.
Notice that excess weight as an indicator immediately weakens the correlation since not every overweight person will experience negative health consequences as a result and we also need to figure out how to measure "overweight". So, there's some built in "fuzziness" right away (as noted by 3) but this is accepted because there's advantage in people being able to test at home with limited equipment AND excess weight is bad for a few other reasons (hard on joints, difficulty with accessibility, etc.).
With that in mind, reading wikipedia, and checking the linked sources leads me to believe that 1 is true. However, this observation does not undermine all metrics nor the practice, only BMI (this is my rebuttal to 2). It's just an invitation to try a bit harder. Waist to hip and waist to height ratio seem to do a better job than BMI, and body fat percentage (measured on a smart device or whatever) does an even better job.
These are my thoughts. I am not a medical professional and so constructive criticism is welcome!
Tl;dr 1-4 is basically a "bad apple spoils the bunch" style argument.
Marksd9 t1_je1mxpd wrote
Thanks for the detailed response. I find the area really interesting since I grew up in an environment where BMI and the dangers of being “overweight” were totally unchallenged.
However the “fuzziness” around this topic always bothered me. Playing rugby, almost every player on my team would be classed as either “Obese” or “morbidly obese” (especially if they were POC’s) despite being high-level athletes. Meanwhile my skinny stoner friends who sat around playing guitar hero all day were classed as being “healthy”, based on a metric that even it’s proponents agree makes no sense. I would say everyone has similar stories of larger people being healthier than many skinny people.
The fussiness extends to the outcomes too, since obesity is only a co-morbidity and also doesn’t apply in all cases it’s easy to say a “fat”person’s weight contributed to a heart attack when that either may not have been the case at all, or may have been a contributing factor but not the actual cause. It may be just as accurate in these situations to suggest that the added stress of being left handed contributed to a heart attack.
This very much sounds like I’m making a very specific argument but what you’re really hearing is my brain melting as it tries to decide between two conclusions:
- Obesity IS the major health risk I’ve been led to believe despite the “fuzziness” in the data and observable conclusions.
- Activists are correct when they say that all the data starts from the point that “fat is bad” and works backwards to justify that conclusion.
TL:DR I’m too dumb and my brain hurts.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments