fat thursday

[moominmolly]

From Junkfood Science, via the_xtina, an article on the Minnesota Starvation Study (about the effects of dieting on healthy adults) that I found quite interesting.

EDIT, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD: What I found interesting was: the mental effects of this deprivation on the healthy, normal-weight patients; the idea of patriotic conscientious objectors in a medical study; and the attitudes surrounding the study in general. The whole article was chock full of interesting attitudes toward the world. The general tone of the article and the obvious bias of the author are not my own.

Comments

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

i'd need to look up the data to be sure, but my understanding is that...

1) body mass index -- while crude, is a serviceable ratio of height to weight -- has increased worldwide over the last several decades.

2) increases in a country's average bmi tend to correlate w/ increases in the country's gdp per capita.

so, if obesity is all genetic, humanity is undergoing rapid evolution, w/ abrupt increases in mutation rates correlated w/ economic growth. i had no idea we possessed that kind of environmental-genetic flexibility.


but the minnesota starvation study is nifty. i came across it a long time ago, and the article i read then had even more disturbing things about what long-term starvation did to the subjects' mental states.

[aerynne.livejournal.com]

Well, it's worth noting that the huge jump in the US over the past decade or so of the percentage of adults who are considered overweight or obese is partly, possibly mostly, due to the fact that they changed the break point. Randomly. With, as far as I've been able to tell, no supporting evidence whatsoever. Just "oh, we'll drop the limit on being considered obese a couple of BMI points" one day.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

oh, yeah. the labelling is a problem, since afaik, it has no connection to what the human body is actually doing. but also afaik, the underlying bmi statistic, while a curious measure, has been tracked consistently.

[harimad.livejournal.com]

It has. BMI is another take on height & weight, which has been tracked for generations. By insurance companies if no one else.

[aerynne.livejournal.com]

I actually had never heard that average BMI worldwide was also increasing. I'd be interested to know whether that took into account, say, starving people in third-world countries where hunger is decreasing (or increasing, for that matter)--I would think you could only reasonably compare first world countries.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

i can't find raw bmi trend data, but the world health organization's study on obesity seems to be the source of the claims on increasing obesity: introduction and part 1, which contains the data (both pdf).

using a fixed definition of obesity (bmi > 30), they find obesity increasing worldwide, but some regions are much better studied than others.