Articles

Unappetizing Facts: No Matter How the Statistics May Be Interpreted, Being Obese or Overweight is a Threat to Health

Editorial
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
June 8, 2005

Is your blood pressure up since your last checkup? Knees hurt more than they used to? Has snoring become a problem? Chances are you've put on a few pounds over the years that have contributed to some or all of these symptoms. Your body is trying to tell you something. Pay attention to it.

That's what makes the "controversy" over the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's recent studies on obesity and mortality seem so silly. It took a few weeks for the agency to come to its senses — after being battered by the don't-worry, eat-happy food marketing crowd — but CDC Director Julie Gerberding finally got back on point last week: "It's not OK to be overweight," Gerberding said. "We need to be absolutely, explicitly clear about one thing: Obesity and overweight are critically important health threats in this country."

That the head of the nation's leading health promotion agency had to call a news conference to state the obvious is a lesson in how health studies can be manipulated in the public relations world. The controversy is essentially over how to measure deaths due to obesity, not over whether excess pounds contribute to health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer and osteoarthritis.

Mortality statistics are always subject to conflicting analysis, depending on how researchers control for diseases and conditions other than the one being studied. But a CDC study published late last year that concluded the death toll from obesity-related illnesses was approaching the number of deaths due to cigarette smoking was also flawed by a computation error. The agency recalculated the data this year and reduced the projected death toll to about 365,000 yearly.

Then, another CDC study using a different, and smaller, study group put the death toll from extreme obesity much lower still, at about 112,000 people per year. The second study also seemed to suggest that people who are overweight but not obese have a lower death rate than people who are normal weight. That finding was immediately disputed because the researchers may have included too many frail and elderly people in the normal weight category.

Nevertheless, armed with what it considered good news that being a little overweight is better than being thin, the folks at the Center for Consumer Freedom — a front for the restaurant industry — jumped on the latest CDC study. They paid for advertisements in newspapers around the country claiming that Americans had been "force-fed a steady diet of obesity myths by the food police."

It's enough to make you gag on a big breakfast burrito.

There is no scientific controversy here. Obesity in the United States is at epidemic levels and it kills tens of thousands of real (not mythical) people every year. The occurrence rate has doubled among adults in the last 30 years and tripled among children age 6-11. It accounts for more than $75 billion in health spending every year — a number that will continue to climb unless more Americans take control of their weight by watching what they eat.

Pay attention to what your body is trying to tell you.

Copyright 2005 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. For more information, visit www.ajc.com.

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