Here’s another good reason to be very leery about second-hand
reports about scientific study results.
Finally, it seems, new reports found some good news about
being obese and having heart disease—or did they?
The studies suggest that people who suffer heart failure and
who are obese are more likely to be alive a year later than thin folks are. Researchers
call it the “obesity paradox.” Here’s one of those studies, in the December
2013 Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Kinda seems like good news to those of us carrying a few
extra pounds.
But almost every news medium and even Elsevier, a publisher of scientific papers, got this story wrong—suggesting that fat was protective against
heart disease: “Is being overweight sometimes a good thing? Data suggest higher
BMI protects against adverse cardiovascular outcomes, reports Mayo Clinic
Proceedings.”
And that, of course, is wrong, wrong, dangerously wrong.
Here’s what the papers really say: If you already have heart
disease, then you’re less likely to die soon if you’re too fat than if you’re too
skinny.
The first study listed above says it clearly enough: “Although
obesity is an independent risk factor for heart failure (HF), once HF is
established, obesity is associated with lower mortality.”
The suggestion that obesity protects against heart disease “is
potentially a dangerous message to promulgate from retrospective data in an
environment saturated with an obesity epidemic and obesity-related conditions
such as type 2 diabetes mellitus and coronary heart disease,” say these researchers in a Mayo Clinic journal.
And the authors of still another paper say: “In our large,
community-based sample, increased body-mass index was associated with an
increased risk of heart failure. Given the high prevalence of obesity in the
United States, strategies to promote optimal body weight may reduce the
population burden of heart failure.”
Being fat makes you twice as likely to get heart disease as people of healthy weight. But once you’re real sick, the fat folks with
heart disease are 22-27 percent less likely to die in the short term. The
obesity paradox discussion in popular media generally only looks at the second
half of that equation.
It’s a little like cell phone company XXX saying, “If you’ll
pay double for this $500 phone, I’ll give you $250 back and it’ll only
cost you $750.” And then all the media saying you ought to choose cell company
XXX because of the great rebate, not mentioning that you’re paying a 50 percent
premium.
The American Heart Association notes that: “Obesity
increases the risk for heart disease and stroke.”
And not only that, “but it harms more than just the heart
and blood vessel system. It's also a major cause of gallstones, osteoarthritis
and respiratory problems.”
A 2013 study confirms this: “Epidemiological studies have
recently shown that obesity, and abdominal obesity in particular, is an
independent risk factor for the development of heart failure.”
The key statistics: nearly 70 percent of people with heart
disease are obese, and, from this study by the Massachusetts Medical Society, “As
compared with subjects with a normal body-mass index, obese subjects had a
doubling of the risk of heart failure.”
And the bigger you get, the higher the risk: “A graded
increase in the risk of heart failure was observed across categories of
body-mass index.”
Why is this important for Hawai`i? The state’s obesity rate climbed from under 10 percent in 1990 to more than 20 percent now.
While we have nearly the lowest obesity rate in the nation (21.8 percent, with only Colorado lower at 21.3), consider
this: In 1991, no state in the U.S. had an obesity rate above 20 percent. Now
they all do.
And while our rate in the Islands is comparatively low, it’s still dangerously high—in 2013 26.8 percent
for men and 20.3 for women. In 2010, there were more than 78,000 people in the Islands
with heart disease.
Sending mixed messages about the dangers of obesity is a danger in itself.
© Jan TenBruggencate 2014
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