Spoiling the joke
25 Apr 2005 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firecatDavid Brooks, attempting to be humorous, opines the following at the New York Times: "Living Longer Is the Best Revenge" (registration required - http://www.bugmenot.com may be able to help). And I'm here to ruthlessly nitpick it.
The release of a report in The Journal of the American Medical Association indicating that overweight people actually live longer than normal-weight people represents an important moment in the history of world civilization.
The history of world civilization? Try the history of Western civilization over the last 100 years or so. Prior to that and elsewhere, most people don't believe that what the US government considers to be a "normal weight" is necessarily the healthiest weight.
Mother Nature, we now know, is a saucy wench, who likes to play cosmic tricks on humanity.
Do you mean, like the cosmic trick of the fact that the Earth isn't at the center of the universe? Because the notion that people with a few pounds more than other people might have a chance of living a little longer doesn't exactly strike me as "cosmic."
health-conscious people can hit a point of negative returns, so the more fit they are, the quicker they kick the bucket. People who work out, eat responsibly and deserve to live are more likely to be culled by the Thin Reaper.
Er, try "the US government and health insurance companies and doctors have for years been mistaken about what is the 'healthiest' way of living and the most 'responsible' way of eating." And, amazingly enough, bodies don't necessarily pay that much attention to social moral judgements such as these people "deserve to live" longer than those people.
I've been happy because as a member of the community of low-center-of-gravity Americans, I find that a lifetime of irresponsible behavior has been unjustly rewarded.
A lifetime of behavior that your society told you was "irresponsible" but your body went ahead with anyway because it knew the right way to nourish itself has turned out to put you in the cohort of people who statistically live the longest. Or in other words, your body is smarter than you are, you stupid jerk. Which shouldn't actually be a cause for embarrassment - the instincts that cause living beings to take in nourishment are a heck of a lot older and better refined than the consciousness than causes humans to feel like they know better than what their bodies tell them.
I like to be reminded that the universe is basically crooked. ... In reality, life is perverse and human beings don't get what they deserve.
Humans make up notions of "deserve" that have nothing to do with reality. Which doesn't mean reality is "perverse." It means humans are mistaken.
Mother Nature is happy to tolerate marginally irresponsible misbehavior. She doesn't want you to go completely to seed. If you're truly obese and arouse hippos when you visit the zoo, you could still punch your ticket at any moment.
Ah, thank goodness "Mother Nature" still has a modicum of human decency.
Darwin was wrong when he talked about the survival of the fittest: it's really the survival of the healthy enough to get by.
Darwin never used the phrase "survival of the fittest," as any good geek will tell you. (But you're right anyway. On this, at least.)
The release of a report in The Journal of the American Medical Association indicating that overweight people actually live longer than normal-weight people represents an important moment in the history of world civilization.
The history of world civilization? Try the history of Western civilization over the last 100 years or so. Prior to that and elsewhere, most people don't believe that what the US government considers to be a "normal weight" is necessarily the healthiest weight.
Mother Nature, we now know, is a saucy wench, who likes to play cosmic tricks on humanity.
Do you mean, like the cosmic trick of the fact that the Earth isn't at the center of the universe? Because the notion that people with a few pounds more than other people might have a chance of living a little longer doesn't exactly strike me as "cosmic."
health-conscious people can hit a point of negative returns, so the more fit they are, the quicker they kick the bucket. People who work out, eat responsibly and deserve to live are more likely to be culled by the Thin Reaper.
Er, try "the US government and health insurance companies and doctors have for years been mistaken about what is the 'healthiest' way of living and the most 'responsible' way of eating." And, amazingly enough, bodies don't necessarily pay that much attention to social moral judgements such as these people "deserve to live" longer than those people.
I've been happy because as a member of the community of low-center-of-gravity Americans, I find that a lifetime of irresponsible behavior has been unjustly rewarded.
A lifetime of behavior that your society told you was "irresponsible" but your body went ahead with anyway because it knew the right way to nourish itself has turned out to put you in the cohort of people who statistically live the longest. Or in other words, your body is smarter than you are, you stupid jerk. Which shouldn't actually be a cause for embarrassment - the instincts that cause living beings to take in nourishment are a heck of a lot older and better refined than the consciousness than causes humans to feel like they know better than what their bodies tell them.
I like to be reminded that the universe is basically crooked. ... In reality, life is perverse and human beings don't get what they deserve.
Humans make up notions of "deserve" that have nothing to do with reality. Which doesn't mean reality is "perverse." It means humans are mistaken.
Mother Nature is happy to tolerate marginally irresponsible misbehavior. She doesn't want you to go completely to seed. If you're truly obese and arouse hippos when you visit the zoo, you could still punch your ticket at any moment.
Ah, thank goodness "Mother Nature" still has a modicum of human decency.
Darwin was wrong when he talked about the survival of the fittest: it's really the survival of the healthy enough to get by.
Darwin never used the phrase "survival of the fittest," as any good geek will tell you. (But you're right anyway. On this, at least.)
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no subject
Date: 26 Apr 2005 12:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 26 Apr 2005 08:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 26 Apr 2005 12:20 pm (UTC)For example, one study suggested that mass/weight*weight wasn't any more accurate at predicting female body shape etc than mass/weight (where 42 was the ideal, nicely enough). This would mean that a short woman could weigh considerably more than via the BMI, suggesting that (since there are more short women than men) that the BMI isn't quite right, to me anyway.
There was also an interesting study from Wales (I think) which showed that the healthiest cohort (in terms of surviving the longest) were the men who had BMIs around 23 at 18, and then gained an average of 16kg over the next 20-30 years. The men who stayed at the same BMI were more likely to die early.
Then there was the study that showed absolutely no effect of BMI in relation to mortality, but amazing effects of fitness, and particularly women who classified themselves as unfit had three times the risk.
I also found it fascinating the way many studies reported U-shaped mortality curves and claimed with a straight face that there was a linear relationship between increasing weight and health risk. Huh?
I didn't manage to ever figure out where the BMI=25 cut-off came from, though. It's like sacred gospel, passed from organisation to organisation, and the studies that take it for granted are the ones to approach with a lot of caution from what I could tell. Oh, the BMI did become popular sometime in the 80s, which wasn't exactly balanced in its attitude to size and shape.
no subject
Date: 26 Apr 2005 04:08 pm (UTC)Fairly recently the approved BMI was revised downward by the US government - I think the top of the range went from 28 or 30 to 25. If I recall correctly, the government's thinking on this may have been "if people think the approved BMI is lower, they will make more effort to avoid gaining weight." (As opposed to their having studies to back up the new number.) There were news articles at the time about how the new BMI range put actor Tom Cruise and almost all professional baseball and football players into the "overweight or obese" category.
no subject
Date: 27 Apr 2005 09:09 am (UTC)< 18.5 "underweight"
18.5 - 24.9 "normal"
25 - 29.9 "overweight"
>30.0 "obese"
These categories are used, with these names, in many places other than the US. They're mentioned in Australia, where WHO is the claimed source. I first saw them in a book back in the 80s. I'm trying to figure out who came up with them, and why they got so generally adopted when we seem to have plenty of evidence they don't correspond to anything meaningful.
no subject
Date: 27 Apr 2005 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 27 Apr 2005 10:27 pm (UTC)(It was either the first or second edition of "Everygirl" by Llewellyn-Jones. I see from Amazon that the fourth edition came out in 2003, but nothing about previous editions.)
Actually, what I think I remember was that "underweight" was < 19.0 in "Everygirl", so that would be an adjustment since then. That was around the time that I discovered that <21.0 was underweight for me.
What would be very interesting is if the "overweight" category started at >25, went up for a while, and has now been put back down. But I'm finding it really hard to get documentation, partly I'll admit because I'm not sure what to search for.