tikistitch

From wintersweet....

Causes of Death Are Linked to a Person’s Weight

About two years ago, a group of federal researchers reported that overweight people have a lower death rate than people who are normal weight, underweight or obese. Now, investigating further, they found out which diseases are more likely to lead to death in each weight group.

Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights, they report that overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

As a consequence, the group from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute reports, there were more than 100,000 fewer deaths among the overweight in 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, than would have expected if those people had been of normal weight.

Haven't read the paper yet, but scanning through the NY Times summary, we're struck by the fact that one of the diseases listed as sparing us overweight folks is "lung disease." People have known for a while that waistlines in the USA started to expand at just about the time that everybody finally decided to quit smoking. Whatever else you can say about cigarettes, they tend to keep your weight down. Now, being good little researchers, we're sure this group tried to control for smoking, but, as mathematical modelling on big old data sets is kinda what we do day in and day out, we can say from real experience, controlling is hard work.