this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Humanities & Cultures
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The weasel word in all this is “overweight (but not obese)”. This is because obesity is definitely associated with diabetes, heart disease, stroke, sleep apnea and the sequelae of these diseases. Excess fat in our body, glucose in our blood, and weight on our skeleton taxes the body and that will have consequences.
I think we are in a new era for how we see and treat obesity, with better understanding of how it affects us individually and societally, with more tools to tackle it. As such, we should not downplay the importance of weight in a person’s health.
Articles like this really don’t give a full picture of clinical decision making and the job of a physician to make high level research accessible to the patient (which involves simplifying things lots of the time). This leaves us with a headline that makes the public think that doctors don’t know about obesity, which simply is not true. It’s just that the nuance isn’t as big of a deal as this author makes it seem.
I think that's the whole point of the article. Lots of doctors seem to assume that all-cause mortality is correlated with BMI in a straight line, but this article argues that it's actually U-shaped with the minimum in the "overweight" range. It's arguing that these specific people in that overweight but not obese category are getting bad medical advice and treatment because of assumptions derived from observations of the group of people who are overweight or obese.