According to a new study to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), “Being 25 pounds overweight doesn’t appear to raise your risk of dying from cancer or heart disease, says a new government study that seems to vindicate Grandma’s claim that a few extra pounds won’t kill you.” Thus, medical science has begun to confirm what normal folks who lack and agenda axe to grind have known for generations.
Some medical researchers find that remarkable perception of the patently obvious about a few extra pounds and health to be perplexing: “‘This is a very puzzling disconnect,’ said Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. ‘That is a conundrum.’” Others quoted about the study seem to understand its importance: “Why extra fat isn’t always deadly and might even help people survive some illnesses is unclear and in fact disputed by many health experts. But University of South Carolina obesity researcher Steven Blair, who says people can be fat and fit, is a believer. He called the report a careful and plausible analysis, and said Americans have been whipped into a ‘near hysteria’ by hype over the nation’s obesity epidemic. While the epidemic is real, the number of deaths attributed to it and to being overweight has been exaggerated, Blair said.” (Underline added.)
We propose that there is nothing at all perplexing about the new study’s conclusions. In fact, the study merely confirms what we have been reporting for several years. Specifically, that the nationwide anti-obesity epidemic has been deliberately created to support a special-interest agenda through changing of medical standards and promoting Social Marketing Junk Science about the alleged costs of the nationwide “plague” of overweight folks. In 1997 the formula for calculating Body Mass Index (BMI) was changed and the threshold level of what was considered to be obese lowered. As a result, the number of allegedly obese persons in the USA about doubled overnight through statistical sleight of hand. Voila! A new crisis of epidemic proportions that propelled more tax and ban mandates suddenly presented itself.
We should thank JAMA for proving – perhaps unwittingly – that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s $500 million grant commitment to anti-obesity is based on a statistical sham that intentionally misleads responsible health researchers and the voting public. If the “epidemic” was real the health consequences and death rates actually measured in epidemiological and other studies would match the BMI benchmark. Since studies of actual health consequences in context of the manipulated BMI do not match expected results, the BMI is revealed as artificially low (which reasonable folks who genuinely care about responsible public health policy have known for years.)
Information in the JAMA article clearly reveals the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s use of manipulated Junk Science standards to advance special-interest agendas. The foundation has been one of the chief proponents of the exaggerated number of deaths and related nationwide hysteria about weight that Dr. Steven Blair mentioned. The foundation apparently learned their statistical puffery skills so well while developing anti-tobacco Social Marketing sound bites that they just cannot resist putting “the fat ones” through the same ringer with which they have so successfully exploited persons who smoke. Having learned to blow statistical smoke over the War on Tobacco’s science, the foundation now wafts its even more odious and stale epidemiological fumes in the War on Fat. It’s just good news to see that the responsible health care approach to epidemiological studies employed by some researchers is finally catching up with the foundation’s highly paid Agenda-Afflicted mandate muggers.
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