Notes on the News - March 11, 2004

Inaccurate Reporting in "Obesity as Killer" Stories

Headline in Washington Post: "Obesity Passing Smoking as Top Avoidable Cause of Death"

Headline in USA Today: "Obesity on Track as No. 1 Killer"

We are seeing more and more reporting such as this in the media, but this one struck me as being very illustrative of the problem I am seeing so much of in these articles.

Would you believe, to look at the headlines (not to mention the articles that accompany them) that the original study did not measure obesity at all? In fact, in this summary of the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the following words did not even appear once: "obesity", "overweight", "weight".

What was being measured in this study by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) was "diet and physical inactivity". I cheer the CDC for measuring actual behaviors that people have control over - but a big fat BOO to the media for yammering on once again about how the problem is overweight and obesity.

Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services has also fallen into the trap ("Americans need to understand that overweight and obesity are literally killing us,"), and shame on him! We should be focusing on things that people can change, not weight (which people have some control over, but not as much as we are being led to believe). Remember: fitness is much more important than fatness when it comes to health, and good diet has a positive effect however much weight we lose (or don't).

Let's continue the effort to change our behavior in positive ways, one step at a time, and lose the focus on the weight itself. From a health standpoint, it is better to be fit and fat than unfit and thin.