SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

"But Dr. the TV guy said, I would live longer than my normal weight cousin." I guess, you will be familiar with the therm "obesity paradox". A term coined by researchers and picked up by the media to sooth the increasingly overweight majority of the US citizens to believe that even if they cross the border to obesity (which more and more people do), they can still live a healthy  and - assuming that they follow all the good expert panel advice and take their expensive meds, even outlive their normal-weight peers. Now, a recent paper from the Department of Health and Nutrition Sciences at the Brooklyn College of the City University of New York basically states: "There is no such thing as an obesity paradox" In fact the only paradox there is, is the ease with which scientists around the world have been fooled by numerous reports of a lower mortality risk for obese individuals than for normalweight individuals within the past decades (I guess that...

Man, the 70s that was a time! A time, when the average American still had a 20% lower BMI, being normal weight was still the norm and models like those in the photo above did not have to be anorexic. I used to hate it, when old people said that "back in the good old days, everything used to be much better"... one thing, however, certainly was better. The physical health and shape people were in. According to a paper that's been published ahead of print in the journal Public Health and Nutrition , the NHANES data from 1971-2004 clearly shows that the BMI of the average US citizen has risen by ~3pts over this 13-year period and if the trend continued in the years after, we should by now be hovering 4-5pts higher than in 1971-1974, when a BMI of 25.58 kg/m² for men and 25.01 kg/m² for women was the norm. Let's take a look at data I am actually not sure where to start with my detailed recapitulation of the data, but I guess there is no direct causal relationshipp ...