Why?
Not sure.
But Dr. Jennifer Kuk and Dr. Chris Arden from my undergraduate Alma mater York University in Toronto recently published a paper that looked at 6,011 adults and then subdivided them into those who were "metabolically normal" and obese and "metabolically abnormal" and obese and then followed those individuals' mortality rates over the course of 10 years.
The results?
Obesity doesn't generally occur in the absence of metabolic abnormalities (only about 6% of the obese folks fall into this slot), but when it does, it's still associated with the same increase in risk of all-cause mortality.
A little while ago I had the chance to interview Dr. Kuk about her study.
Click below to download the audio file, or you can listen on the embedded player (won't work with email subscribers) and hear Jen discuss her findings.
Click here to download this podcast or click here to subscribe in iTunes!Kuk JL, & Ardern CI (2009). Are metabolically normal but obese individuals at lower risk for all-cause mortality? Diabetes care, 32 (12), 2297-9 PMID: 19729521
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This was a nice followup to Peter's interview with Dr. Kuk over on Obesity Panacea.
ReplyDeleteOne quibble re the title of your post. I get the usefulness of the shorthand of saying "obesity's dangerous." But I think that is misleading in that it doesn't tell the whole story; it reinforces the idea that it's the excess pounds that is the sole problem.
First, Dr. Kuk is hypothesizing that some of the "danger" or mortality risk in these folks is due to later cancer diagnosis (and I presume this could easily be true of mortality risk for those who have metabolic abnormalities). I know it's just a theory, but even still, it seems a bit misleading to say that obesity is the culprit when it may be stigma and/or shame on the part of patients and doctors.*
Second, I realize that fat is not inert. And as Dr. Kuk points out, some of the likely trauma mortality risk is from the challenges of dealing with morbidly obese as far as transportation, diagnostic tools etc.
But I tend to think that there's also quite a bit of the phenomenon that Taubes labels as "what makes you fat makes you sick." I.e., that as Dr. Sharma says, in many cases obesity is a sign, and the real problem is what actually caused the obesity.
* http://xnet.kp.org/permanentejournal/sum03/stigma.html