When reviewing at all the almost 100 scientific articles on obesity and mortality, a group of scientists found that the hype about how being overweight will kill you might be just that, hype. To be honest I am not surprised, I have looked at mortality statistics in the US and globally and found there is very little correlation with death rates. A number of articles about the Obesity Paradox have also been written, but most of them have been swept under the rug. After all how can we justify societal prejudice against the overweight, suggested fat taxes, removing large sugary drinks from metropolitan regions, and charging overweight people more for seats and health care, if being overweight is not any more dangerous than being 'healthy' weight?
True, I can hear the protestations now, perhaps you don't die earlier, but your health must be worse right? Well perhaps that is true, but some research suggests that it is the Yo Yo dieting and lack of exercise are probably worse for you than just being overweight (yes some people considered overweight do exercise). It seems that just being thinner than someone else does not automatically make you healthier than the larger person.
I was overweight, the docs would ascribe all my ailments to being overweight, yet I would lose weight and the ailments would remain, and then the docs would start treating the symptoms as something other than side effects from being overweight. I would go in for knee pain from working out too much and be lectured on the dangers of being overweight.
The internet is a wonderful thing, there is so much data that you don't have to be a scientist to find the data and do a little analysis with it. You can look at crime and health trends, the effects of demographics on health, the effect of married life on crime. However, I found it very surprising that it was very difficult to find statistics and research on the effects of stress on health and mortality. What little research there is suggests that stress has a negative effect on health, and tends to increase mortality.
The Obesity related industry is a multibillion dollar industry, it encompasses everything from diet books, to treadmills to drug companies. There is a strong economic incentive to convince the overweight that there is something fundamentally wrong with them and to socially shame them into attempting to lose weight. The difficulty in losing weight and keeping that weight off (should be easy if it really was that healthy, from an evolutionary standpoint), keeps money rolling into that industry year after year.
If people are trying to reach weights that are too low for them, then the difficulty many have in losing weight probably has more to do with that, than with will power. I suspect that 'normal' weight has a much wider range than what is currently accepted and that it is not that overweight people have better survival rates, but that the charts are not correct in identifying who is obese, overweight, normal weight and underweight.
But being overweight is something that industry can target and make money off. It would be more difficult for companies to make money off stress. You can't marginalize the stressed, everyone is stressed, so the shaming tactics used against the obese, can't easily be used against the stressed. Ironically many of the tactics used unsuccessfully to target being overweight, can be successfully used to reduce stress, however it is much harder to motivate people to do things that are good for them but which they may not enjoy if there is societal stigma attached to what they are trying to reduce as with obesity and cigarette smoking, it was not the fact that smoking was bad for your health that gets people to stop smoking, often it is to societal stigma attached to smoking that gets people to quit.
You can smell smoke and see smokers, you can tell visually if someone is overweight, but it is much harder to see if someone is stressed and thus it is much harder to bring societal pressure on those that are stressed to de stress. Stress is the elephant in the room, increasing the death rates from cancer, infectious disease, high blood pressure and heart disease. Yet it is hardly ever mentioned when it comes to reducing levels of those diseases.
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