Research news: Study flips ideas on obesity's risks

The News:
Study flips ideas on obesity's risks
Some heft actually helps fend off many causes of death, but not diabetes and kidney disease, federal scientists find.
By Rob Stein The Washington Post
Article Last Updated: 11/06/2007 09:45:37 PM MST
WASHINGTON — Being overweight boosts the risk of dying from diabetes and kidney disease but not cancer or heart disease, and carrying some extra pounds appears actually to protect against a host of other causes of death, federal researchers reported Tuesday.
The counterintuitive findings, based on a detailed analysis of decades of government data about more than 39,000 Americans, suggest that being overweight does carry risks, but the dangers may be less dire than thought.
"The take-home message is that the relationship between fat and mortality is more complicated than we tend to think," said Katherine Flegal, a senior research scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, who led the study.
The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, was greeted with sharply mixed reactions. Some praised it for providing persuasive evidence that the dangers of fat have been overblown.
The analysis is based on the best health statistics federal scientists collected between 1971 and 2004, including cause-of-death data from 2.3 million adults from 2004.

The Research:
Read the research behind this story in the Journal of the American Medical Association.