This Is Not Okay

Yesterday, M showed me this tweet by @SFoodie, the food blog run by SF Weekly:

This made me want to reach into the Internet and throttle the writer for: (1) poor reading comprehension skills, (2) sloppy reporting, and (3) irresponsibly handing people a "science-based" excuse for ignoring a potentially life-threatening health problem.

Let's be perfectly clear: The study referenced in the tweet DOES NOT SAY THAT BEING FAT IS HEALTHY.

The real story? Canadian researchers looked at whether people with high Body Mass Index (BMI) scores are uniformly at high risk for an early death. To test this, they looked at a bunch of people they classified as "obese" BASED ON THE SUBJECTS' BMI SCORES, ranked their health according to the Edmonton Obesity Staging System (EOSS), and compared mortality rates. A subject with an EOSS score of 0 was one who showed no problematic symptoms, while a person with a score of 4 (the highest possible score) was one with severe chronic diseases and disabilities.

The conclusion? Not all folks with high BMIs are at risk of early death.

This is not rocket science, folks. A high BMI tells you absolutely nothing about the state of a person's body composition or health. A muscle-bound person with little body fat might have a very high BMI and a flabby "skinny fat" smoker might have a "normal" one, but it doesn't mean that the former is obese any more than it means that Michael Jackson was a super-healthy fella. Body mass should not be mistaken for body fat. And while the researchers (unfortunately) used "high BMI" interchangeably with "obesity," let's be real: When most people think about obesity, the dictionary definition comes to mind -- and it's all about "excessive accumulation and storage of fat in the body."

Take elite CrossFit firebreather Rob Orlando. His BMI is above 29, which puts him in borderline "obese" territory. But does he look fat to you? Would you use the word "obese" to describe him?



Let's face it: BMIs are completely useless as an indicator of health. And in fact, this is precisely what the Canadian researchers were seeking to show. As a recent CNN article pointed out, "[t]he main question was whether BMI alone could determine who dies early, said Dr. Arya Sharma, the lead author [of the study]." Unsurprisingly, the answer was "no." (Duh.)

You wouldn't know it from the articles written about the study, though. SF Weekly's article, for example, looks like this:

That's right: "[Y]ou can have your cake, eat it, and, um, have some more."

And this wasn't an outlier. Other "respectable" publications wrote headlines like:

• "Being Obese Not Necessarily Bad" (Toronto Sun)

• "Obese And Healthy: Not All Overweight People Need To Worry" (The Huffington Post)

• "Study: It's Okay to be Fat" (Voice of America)

• "Study: Obese People Live as Long as Slimmer People" (WebMD).

• "Obesity Police Busted? Study Says Fat Folks Can Be Healthy"(CBS News)

Similarly, Facebook and Twitter lit up with further distortions of the study's conclusions:

No one's going to spend even a minute on Google to track down the original study. They're not going to hear that BMIs are bunk. But they will take away the message that "being fat can be GOOD for you" -- so why worry?



P.S.: WTF, Barry Sears?

Time After Time

There is so much wrong with this slanted article in Time Magazine about the Paleo lifestyle, it made my head hurt. But I shouldn't be surprised; this is, after all, the same publication that put Ancel Keys on its cover and fed his low-fat, high-carb message to the masses.)



I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Hopefully, ABC's Nightline feature on Paleo (airing tomorrow night and featuring both Art De Vany and Robb Wolf) won’t be quite as smugly dismissive and uneven. Set your DVRs.

[UPDATED: The Nightline segment didn't run 'til March 1. You can view it here.]

Sometimes, They Get It Right

Who says all the nutrition information in glossy magazines is total bullshit? (Okay, besides me.)

Fine. I'll concede that occasionally, the popular press hits the nail on the head. And maybe -- just maybe -- they're getting it right a little more often these days. The latest issue of Men's Journal features an article entitled "Everything You Know About Nutrition Is Wrong," and discusses Gary Taubes' well-supported argument that it's our intake of carbs, not calories, that makes us fat:

During the past several years, conventional dietary wisdom — skimp on fat, count calories — has started to crumble, thanks largely to a one-man wrecking crew named Gary Taubes. In his latest book, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, Taubes argues that calories and fat aren’t to blame for the world’s increasing girth and high incidence of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. He contends that exercise, while a healthy habit, won’t help with weight loss, and that most Americans would benefit from eating more red meat and eggs because animal proteins and saturated fat don’t cause cardiovascular disease and weight gain: Simple sugars and carbohydrates do.

I told you so.

(Source: Men's Journal)

Use Your Head

Back in March, the L.A. Times published a piece about how researchers examined 18 years' worth of data and concluded that weightlifting injuries are on the rise.



It must be a slow news day, because today, nine months after the fact, the New York Times decided to report on the same study. And what new information did the Gray Lady have to add?

This year Jessica Cleary, a 40-year-old mother from Chicago, joined the growing number of injured weight trainers. Ms. Cleary said in an interview that she had been working out with free weights and on resistance machines about five times a week for several years. She believed she was well trained, having been guided by a personal trainer for eight months. But on a fateful day last May she slid off a leg-strengthening machine head first, and her neck landed hard on a metal part of the equipment.

Unable to talk and having trouble breathing, she was taken to an emergency room, where tests showed she had fractured her larynx. A challenging operation and three months of recovery later, she said she felt lucky to have ended up with “only a paralyzed vocal cord” and a permanently raspy voice.

“At another gym on a similar piece of equipment, a woman broke her neck,” Ms. Cleary told me.

And once there was a guy who stuck his penis in a tree and got bitten by a squirrel. Lesson: Your ween doesn't belong in a tree, just as your ass doesn't belong on a "leg strengthening machine" if you have no clue how to use it properly.

Tip of the Day: If you want to strengthen your legs without "slid[ing] off a leg-strengthening machine head first" (and by the way, how exactly does one manage to do that?), do SQUATS, for crying out loud.

And can someone please explain to me why wasn't this nominated for a Darwin Award instead of being held up as an example of a common weightlifting injury?

Is Meat Bad For You?

This post is going to be slightly long and geeky. If you have a short attention span or just stumbled here looking for a cheap laugh, feel free to skip this one and proceed directly to the video of the farting yoga lady.

But if you'd like to know why I'm calling bullshit on the recent hype over an epidemiological study "proving" that meat-eating is bad for low-carb dieters, read on.