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Wednesday, March 10, 2004Eating too much and exercising too little are poised to pass smoking as America's leading cause of preventable death, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday. The finding, announced Tuesday at a Washington news conference and published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, elevates to a crisis the continuing trend of obesity, the researchers said. Haven't the public health scolds been calling it a "crisis" for some time now? Well, yes, but now they see it as more of a crisis. It's a crisis crisis! "We knew there was an epidemic of obesity, and that it would have important effects on disability and mortality," said Dr. James Marks, a study co-author and director of the CDC's chronic disease center. "But this is the worst we could have thought of." The study that's brought on all the furor is this one written by, among others, Julie L. Gerberding, the head of the CDC. (Who once famously remarked that obesity is more of a threat than terrorism.) Their objective was to link lifestyle choices to mortality. Of course, when the coroner lists the cause of death on death certificate, you can bet he never writes - "smoking" or "obesity." He documents the disease he found - "heart attack," or "cancer." So how do they know that obesity is gaining on smoking as the number one cause of death? For that matter, how do they know that smoking as opposed to say, aging, is the number one cause of death? They don't. They are, in large part, assuming it. Here's what they did. They got the leading causes of death for the year 2000 from CDC data. That is, the disease that actually killed people in 2000: 1. Heart Disease 710,760 2. Cancer 563,091 3. Strokes 167,661 4. Chronic Lung Disease 122,009 5. Accidents 97,900 6. Diabetes 69,301 7. Influenza/pneumonia 65,313 8. Alzheimer's 49,558 9. Kidney disease 37,251 10. Overwhelming infection 31,224 Then, they did a literature search of all articles published between 1980 and 2002 on the risk factors that interested them - smoking, physical activity, diet, obesity, alcohol, sexual behavior, illicit drug use, etc. They took the data from these articles and determined the relative risk of getting a disease for each chosen risk factor, and the relative risk of death for each risk factor. With this, they derived an estimate of how many deaths from each disease were caused by any given risk factor. Then, they had the audacity to call their estimate the "actual cause of death." (You will notice that they did not do a search for "aging," perhaps the greatest risk factor of all for the top three leading causes of death.) It is, all things considered, a very weak study. Certainly too weak to be the foundation of sweeping public policy: In addition, the National Institutes of Health has proposed an anti-obesity research agenda, and a special task force is expected Thursday to give formal recommendations to the Food and Drug Administration on what the agency can to do to help reverse the cresting public health crisis. What will the FDA do about it? Condemn our food? Make it illegal to sell cookies? Or just illegal to buy them unless your BMI is less than 25? UPDATE: Steve Milloy calls the CDC study statistical malpractice. Heh. posted by Sydney on 3/10/2004 08:26:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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