There is no real evidence to support the idea that heavy people die young. I work with the geriatric population and elderly people come in a variety of sizes as well. The heavy ones do not have any greater incidence of heart disease, type II diabetes, or high cholesterol than the slender or intermediate sized ones. Persons of a higher weight tend to be at greater risk for osteoarthritis in the lower extremities at a younger age, although as people age this tends to even out. People with a more slender phenotype tend to be at greater risk for osteoporosis. These are the only truisms that I have seen. The Vague Future Health Threat simply does not play out.
My great grandmother on my mother's side was five feet tall and weighed 300 pounds. She died at 80, not from any of the supposed "obesity" diseases, but from acute myeloid leukemia, which does not discriminate based on size. It took her from being a reasonably healthy 300 pound 79 year old to being an emaciated 95 pound 80 year old and dead in less than a year.
Size is not an accurate predictor of health.
My mother was fat most of her adult life (5' 7" and upwards of 250 lbs). She gained weight after she married my dad and had me and my brother and was never able to lose it, in spite of all the diets and diet pills she tried over the years. She passed away at the age of 76 after battling ovarian cancer for 10 years (losing her bladder, part of her bowel, and eventually part of her small intestine and not being able to eat or drink anything at all the last 2 months of her life). Ovarian cancer hits women of all sizes and isn't caused by being fat or thin. The survival rate for ovarian cancer is very small, and that my mother lived as long as she did after diagnosis is a tribute to her stubbornness, will to live, and the fact that she had those stores of fat to draw on when she needed them. So anyone who tells me that my health is threatened by my fat is going to be told that my fat is there to sustain me through a catastrophic illness, should I end up with one, which illness is not guaranteed to happen just because I'm fat. Those things happen to thin people all the time too, and thin people die of them just as often as fat people, if not more often because thin people don't have those fat reserves to draw on.
ReplyDeleteThat's true. And having seen how cancer can make a stick out of health people, I now associate extreme thinness with sickness.
ReplyDeleteI now I shouldn't but I can't help it.
I'm sorry about your mom, Vesta. Ovarian cancer is a monster. I think that you're right that her size enabled her to live longer than someone with less reserves. My great grandmother would have been dead a lot more quickly if she hadn't had a good store of adipose tissue. She was a big stout farm woman with a hardy constitution. I wish I could have known her better.
ReplyDeleteAmanda, I know what you mean. I usually associate extreme thinness with anorexia and it isn't always true. There are people who are just naturally skinny. I used to work with a gal who ate enough for two people and yet was skinny as a rail. She was always being approached by well meaning people who were concerned with her size. I also found her in tears once because one of her friends had launched a verbal assault on her once when she told the friend her new outfit looked good. The friend said sarcastically "wonderful. It's not like I can wear just anything like a skinny bitch like you can."
That's what I hate about this "war on obesity." It turns people against each other for something arbitrary, like how we're built.
How sad about the thin gal. People were acting very wacky when I was at my thinnest too, so that it's a relief not to be as thin anymore.
ReplyDeleteWhile I sometimes privately snark at the "fashionable" thinness of rich women, I'd never actually treat them or anyone else that way. NEVER.