Measure yourself!
It is National Diabetes week. Diabetes Australia is running a campaign asking people to measure themselves and to learn more about diabetes.
Apparently, excess weight around the abdomen increases one’s risk for developing type 2 diabetes, so the request to measure up. It is associated with blindness, heart diseases, kidney diseases and amputation.
Basically, keep fit and stay healthy!
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Just to get some discussion going, it’s worth pointing out that there is some controversy within medicine on the risks of excess weight around the abdomen (thought you would never know it, from the information we get via news and campaigns like the current spates of Cancer Council ads).
Of course everyone should be somewhat concerned with their health… just, to be healthy.
But links between obesity and conditions like diabetes, cancer, heart disease (and almost every other medical condition under the sun, really) aren’t as simple as weight = unhealthy.
One of the issues in the medical literature is “correlation vs. causation”; epidemiological studies basically establish correlations between some feature (like, number of hours spent doing homework) and medical conditions (like carpal tunnel syndrome). But many claims about the health of overweight people are claims about “causation” = “doing too much homework gives you carpal tunnel syndrome”. In the example i gave, its safe to suggest there really is a causation. But consider another correlation - like the correlation between your age and fuel prices. Nobody would suggest that fuel is getting more expensive because you’re continuing to age.
With obesity, there’s a big problem in studies that link weight with various illnesses, because overweight people should be expected to have poorer health even if fat had *nothing* to do with health (i.e. there would be a correlation even if there was no causation at all). For example, studies have shown that overweight people are more likely to report being poorly treated by medical professionals, and are less likely to want to go to a doctor in the first place. Thus, medical conditions slip past and health deteriorates without them getting decent advice on it, thus they end up having more health problems in general when someone comes along and wants to do an epidemiological survey. (A related issue is that overweight people sometimes report that doctors won’t give them a detailed examination, saying “lose weight and then come and see me” rather than concentrating on the patients actual complaint. This has the same effect in promoting general ill health, even if weight itself isn’t the person’s problem.)
Another complication is that high weight may be a sign of some *other* cause of ill health. E.g. Overweight people might show greater signs of toothy decay, but excess fat has nothing to do with tooth decay. It’s just associated with eating sugar, which is a cause of both tooth decay and high weight.
Dieting is another example; for a long time people thought that excess weight was a primary cause of heart problems. Then more refined studies were done, that separated overwiehgt non-deiters from overweight-dieters. It turns out that “yo-yo-dieting” is more strongly linked to heart problems than being overweight without yo-yo-dieting. Overweight people in our culture are more likely to have diets sold to them, and to feel they need to diet. Dieting patterns cause health problems, and then studies that fail to separate dieters from non-dieters will conclude that weight is the primary cause of the issue.
So… yes. These thoguths were playing on my mind after seeing one of the Cancer Council ads, so i thought i might bring it up for discussion…