

Excess Pounds, but Not Too Many, May Lead to Longer Life - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/health/26weight.html

======
drcode
The headline is designed to sound like a causation was established, when in
fact the research can only point to a correlation.

People who are more sedentary probably just have higher incomes and therefore
avoid other health pitfalls.

Why can't the MSM learn a bit of statistics?

~~~
anamax
> People who are more sedentary probably just have higher incomes and
> therefore avoid other health pitfalls.

You do actually have data to support your claim, right? (I don't know either
way, but I'm not making any claims either.)

> Why can't the MSM learn a bit of statistics?

They're journalists.

------
bgray
Seriously, one day we read an article saying a diet "near starvation" will
help us live longer and the next we read "excess pounds" is the way to go. The
key is doing everything in moderation.

~~~
tokenadult
The trick in defining moderation is knowing what the extreme values are, which
is why I find reports on optimal body mass indexes interesting.

~~~
drcode
The only way to run an experiment that could determine optimal BMI would be to
lock up groups of randomly selected people in a jail-style environment for
decades, where their diet could be accurately controlled. In other words,
we'll never know the answer to this question for humans, despite what this
article claims.

We've done these experiments in animals and those experiments suggest an
extreme starvation diet leads to the longest lifespan.

~~~
tokenadult
I appreciate you mentioning the issue of experiment design in your reply. I
enjoy posting in HN comments a link to Peter Norvig's article about that issue

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

which mentions some of the trade-offs involved in different forms of study
designs.

The history of the prescribed drug Rimonabant (Acomplia)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimonabant>

illustrates some of the problems with using animal studies to establish safety
of interventions for human beings. The animal studies have to be done, and
they are generally very helpful, but some aspects of human behavior are
sufficiently complicated and not analogous to animal behavior that what looks
safe and effective for animals turns out not to be beneficial for human
beings.

~~~
drcode
Thanks for the great Norvig link

------
tokenadult
Here's a link to a body mass calculator that takes either customary United
States measurements or metric system measurements:

<http://www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/>

------
kingkongrevenge
Strength is one of the best measures of health, especially as people age. Old
people who are still strong will live a long time.

I suspect this study is just confirming that people with higher muscle mass
live longer.

~~~
icey
Do you have any facts or research to back this up? Beyond a certain baseline
level of fitness, I would be pretty surprised to find out stronger means
living longer. You would expect to see a lot more strongmen get to be over 80
years old if that was true.

~~~
kingkongrevenge
There are a lot of old strongmen. Jack Lalanne, off the top of my head for
one.

People die of old age when their lean body mass gets too low; when they look
all skeletal. It's about that simple. The organs and muscles have wasted away
too much and there's no power left. It makes perfect sense that people with
more lean body mass will live longer. In contrast, endurance athletes are
known to die young.

\----

...the Cooper Clinic in a paper published by Ruiz and co-authors found that
cancer deaths are lowest in the strongest group.

Jonatan R. Ruiz and his co-authors tested more than 8,000 subjects aged 20 to
80 for muscular strength. They grouped individuals into three categories of
strength and found that the age-adjusted risk of cancer was 17.5 per thousand
in the weakest group, 11.0 in the middle group, and 10.3 in the strongest
group. The weaker groups also had higher blood pressure, higher cholesterol,
more cardiovascular disease, and more of them had diabetes. (Cancer
Epidemiological Biomarkers Prevention 2009;18(5):1468–76).

