Given that (a) my pre-preg BMI was roughly 28.5, (b) I had relatively little body fat then except in my boobs and a thin skim of subcutaneous, and (c) I think most people looking at me [and my doctors!] would agree that I was not in fact any kind of an unhealthy weight ...
AND that the statistics everyone cites with the big terror-scare thing involve, basically, percentages of the US population who are "fatter than me" ...
I find it not at all hard to imagine that, say, 40% of the US can be "fatter than me" and still most of them NOT be unhealthy.
The single greatest predictive factor about whether any given person is going to end up being obese or not has, believe it or not, nothing to do with diet or exercise. It has to do with heredity. If you have pudgy people in your family, you're much more likely to become pudgy. This is shown over and over, and yet the wash of Scare Tactics and FAT IS IMMORAL news stories do not stop. Even when the Amish study came back (a group known, as a whole, for eating fatty 'unhealthy' food and getting lots of healthy exercise) and showed that the only factor that had any statistical relationship to their weight was THEIR FAMILY'S WEIGHTS, the press releases pulled one tiny 20% correlation out and publicised that all over the news.
The other interesting thing, if you actually look at studies (and not just newspapers), is that there is increasing evidence that the 'risk factors' we've been told to minimize to 'avoid dying of a heart attack' (lower our weight and our cholesterol, etc) actually have very little relationship to getting, or dying from, a heart attack ...
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Re: Echolalia
Date: 2009-01-31 06:21 pm (UTC)AND that the statistics everyone cites with the big terror-scare thing involve, basically, percentages of the US population who are "fatter than me" ...
I find it not at all hard to imagine that, say, 40% of the US can be "fatter than me" and still most of them NOT be unhealthy.
The single greatest predictive factor about whether any given person is going to end up being obese or not has, believe it or not, nothing to do with diet or exercise. It has to do with heredity. If you have pudgy people in your family, you're much more likely to become pudgy. This is shown over and over, and yet the wash of Scare Tactics and FAT IS IMMORAL news stories do not stop. Even when the Amish study came back (a group known, as a whole, for eating fatty 'unhealthy' food and getting lots of healthy exercise) and showed that the only factor that had any statistical relationship to their weight was THEIR FAMILY'S WEIGHTS, the press releases pulled one tiny 20% correlation out and publicised that all over the news.
The other interesting thing, if you actually look at studies (and not just newspapers), is that there is increasing evidence that the 'risk factors' we've been told to minimize to 'avoid dying of a heart attack' (lower our weight and our cholesterol, etc) actually have very little relationship to getting, or dying from, a heart attack ...
See also the blog Junkfood Science, if you want more info.