Here’s an interesting article from JunkScience that calls into question the obesity-related death statistics that are conventionally cited.
Make no mistake, overweight and obesity are problems, but they are problems that need to be dealt with by accurate science, and there has been all too little of that in connection with diets and dieting.
The article points out that the obesity-related death statistics are unbalanced because they exclude the effect overweight has on elderly Americans. This may be a bad thing because, as the article notes, studies find that among the elderly obesity either has no correlation with mortality or it has a strong negative correlation.
In other words: Having some extra pounds available as nutritional reserves when you are old and in ill-health may be a good thing.
Having excess weight when younger is definitely bad and is correlated to all kinds of health problems, some of which can be life-threatening. But it may be that our bodies know what they’re doing when they allow extra pounds to accumulate with advancing age. We may be stocking up supplies for when the going gets tough in old age the way bears put on fat for the winter.
Much more research obviously needs to be done here, but it’s an interesting hypothesis.
In the future we might have more ideal-weight tables that include age as an axis, only this time they’ll be backed up by science instead of guesswork.
Something better than the BMI, which assumes that everyone has the exact same skeletal structure, would be helpful as well. Apparently hot tubs are too expensive for doctors? (immersive displacement versus weight in order to determine fat mass versus non-fat mass)