Reading through the article it sounds like not a great study, not asking enough questions and not tracking key information, such as cause of death.
Sounds like one of those things where people are going to headline what they want out of it and use it to champion their bias. “Being overweight doesn’t kill you, yay!” Nah, it’s way more complicated than that. People with cancer and other diseases often lose weight, a lot of it, and studies like this don’t do a good job of tracking this info.
I thought it was pretty well-known that BMI is a bullshit metric.
A short, thin, but bulky person can have an obese BMI because it doesn’t take into account fat percentage or muscle mass. It’s doesn’t account for diet quality and it doesn’t account for fitness.
A ratio of weight to height tells you basically nothing about your health.
It’s generally considered bullshit. But a large number of people cling to it, even when you point out glaring flaws like every power lifter is considered dangerously overweight.
The main issue is that BMI is just something for professionals to glance at when dealing with hundreds of patients, not a definitive system that individuals should use to inform their own lifestyle decisions. The reason it’s so popular is because it is really accurate for large populations in that context.
But what you actually want to figure out, if you want to evaluate whether you should change your weight or lifestyle, is your body fat percentage. The Navy body fat calculator is accurate to within 3%, but requires you to measure your waist, hip, and neck in addition to your height and weight. Still an estimate, but a much much better one than BMI
Reading through the article it sounds like not a great study, not asking enough questions and not tracking key information, such as cause of death.
Sounds like one of those things where people are going to headline what they want out of it and use it to champion their bias. “Being overweight doesn’t kill you, yay!” Nah, it’s way more complicated than that. People with cancer and other diseases often lose weight, a lot of it, and studies like this don’t do a good job of tracking this info.
I thought it was pretty well-known that BMI is a bullshit metric.
A short, thin, but bulky person can have an obese BMI because it doesn’t take into account fat percentage or muscle mass. It’s doesn’t account for diet quality and it doesn’t account for fitness.
A ratio of weight to height tells you basically nothing about your health.
It’s generally considered bullshit. But a large number of people cling to it, even when you point out glaring flaws like every power lifter is considered dangerously overweight.
The main issue is that BMI is just something for professionals to glance at when dealing with hundreds of patients, not a definitive system that individuals should use to inform their own lifestyle decisions. The reason it’s so popular is because it is really accurate for large populations in that context.
But what you actually want to figure out, if you want to evaluate whether you should change your weight or lifestyle, is your body fat percentage. The Navy body fat calculator is accurate to within 3%, but requires you to measure your waist, hip, and neck in addition to your height and weight. Still an estimate, but a much much better one than BMI
After all, it’s not the cancer that kills you - it’s just the multi-organ failure.
New study: cancer not linked to death.
So many studies are exactly as you describe; here’s what (bias) I want to prove, let’s find (make up) some data to prove it.
Also, avoid cnn.com. What a trash site disguised as a news outlet.