Re: If you want your comment to stay up here...chaoticidealismJuly 30 2009, 22:22:32 UTC
One in 100 dieters do succeed in losing weight and keeping it off. That doesn't make it any easier for the other 99. (The study in question used Weight Watchers and followed participants for 5 years. I would like to see longer-term stuff on the effects of yo-yo dieting, especially.) We really need to stop focusing on weight as an indicator of health or of moral character; by itself it's not too strongly associated with those things, especially in the "overweight" range. I'd like to dig through the Framingham heart study data to try to figure this out.
What I want to pin numbers to is: What happens if you separate out overweight and obesity from other risk factors like poor diet and an inactive lifestyle? I would not be surprised if the risk all but vanishes, especially for simple overweight... my PubMed alerts have been pinging me a couple of studies that support the conclusion that overweight + healthy lifestyle + absence of other risk factors poses very little risk, but there is really nothing large-scale, long-term. Of course the Framingham study didn't record nutrition and physical activity, which was quite frankly a huge oversight for such a long-term study, but I guess we didn't know better three generations ago.
What I want to pin numbers to is: What happens if you separate out overweight and obesity from other risk factors like poor diet and an inactive lifestyle? I would not be surprised if the risk all but vanishes, especially for simple overweight... my PubMed alerts have been pinging me a couple of studies that support the conclusion that overweight + healthy lifestyle + absence of other risk factors poses very little risk, but there is really nothing large-scale, long-term. Of course the Framingham study didn't record nutrition and physical activity, which was quite frankly a huge oversight for such a long-term study, but I guess we didn't know better three generations ago.
We're starting to learn better now though.
Health at Every Size:
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/mar06/health0306.htm
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