fear mongering and fat-phobia at its worst

A story released today once again has attempted to shower us fat people with gloom and doom by telling us that even if we have low blood pressure and cholesterol we will most certainly die of heart diseased. . I am annoyed and cranky and will crunch the numbers myself once I can ahold of the complete study (it is not avaialble in full from JAMA yet). However, let me break down what I pulled from the AP article:

• This study only tracked BP and cholesterol in middle age and did not track whether or not the people who later died of heart disease had developed high BP and cholesterol (thirty years later). According to the article, "Yan (one of the researchers) said it is possible that some overweight participants developed high blood pressure and cholesterol problems during the study, which could have contributed to their deaths." Um, yeah. Not tracking for such indicators at time of death or disease is as bad of science as I ever have seen. People's health profiles will change over thirty years. Duh!


• 17,643 people participated in the study


• Of the participants, 1,187 had normal BP and cholesterol in their forties, 6.7% of the total. Of these, 494 were considered overweight or obese (41.6%).


• Over the course of the stduy 1,594 heart disease deaths occurred (roughly 9%) Of these. only 31 started the study with normal blood pressure and cholesterol (2% of the deaths).. Now, the article doesn't state how many of these 31 were considered "obsese", but the numbers are so small at this point I seriously doubt there is any real statistical signifance going on, unless it was manufactured by crappy and "creative" statistical analysis. So, from these 31 deaths they are claiming fat people are doomed to heart disease??? All 31 weren't even fat people (let's recall, there were 494 fat people who started the study with normal BP and cholesterol) AND we don't know if the people that died had high BP or high cholesterol at the time the heart disease developed.

I admit is is possible the numbers were mis-represented in the AP article. I plan to get ahold of the actual article and if they print all sample sizes as they should, I will run the numbers myself. However, given the researchers' statements and what I have before me, it seems nothing more than fear mongering combined with bad science.

for hire--Someone to prop up my head

I am soooooooooooooo tired.