Reply #39: Care to back that up?

[dmallind]

The silly CDC study that extrapolated 365000 deaths from obesity a year has already not only been debunked but, a great rarity indeed, officially retracted. They currently use numbers that are lower than alcohol and 1/4 that of smoking.

http://www.cdc.gov/PDF/Frequently_Asked_Questions_About_Calculating_Obesity-Related_Risk.pdf

Oh and even with the silly inflated number it was still less than smoking at 435000 so even that one stupid exaggerated and retracted study doesn't make your claim true.

Now can you link to anything that actually shows aggregate affects on longevity rather than scaremongering BS about increased risk of X? I mean buying three lottery tickets gives you a 300% greater "risk" of winning than if you had bought one. How often does it make a difference? Whenever ANY study about ANYTHING says "XXX% greater chance of Y" you should ALWAYS do what you can to find out what the base risk of getting Y is. Exchanging a 99.999% chance of avoiding some specific oogabooga disease with strict diet and exercise for a 99.997% chance of avoiding it and living how you choose to might seem like a bad idea to you, but not to me. When you come up with something that says "fat people get this horrible disease at a rate of 50% and non fat people at a rate of 0.5%" then I'll listen, but panicking and making huge lifestyle changes over a couple percent either way? Who the hell cares. We all have to die of something.

I'll even save you the time since you of course will do nothing that might invalidate your silly bigotry by confronting facts. The only group of overweight people who suffer a significant loss in life expectancy are white males who had a body mass index of over 40 (just short of 300lbs at average height) by age 20 and never lost the weight. Every other group is looking at either no change or a couple or three years. So, if you are naturally endomorphic your choice is, on average, live to 80 by spending hours a day exercising and cutting out a huge range of food choices, or live to 77 how you choose. Sure some fatties will drop dead of heart attacks before 77, but so will some scrawnies too. Anecdotes can never be used to contradict data (although I'm sure it will be tried).