LifeStyle & Obesity: the Thompson Medstat Research Brief

Well, the newspaper reports of the obesity survey discussed last time had been weighing on my mind over the weekend so much so that I finally went out and googled the actual report. What I found had nothing much to do with the focus of most news stories, and surprisingly the conclusions fit more or less into what I have been writing about in this blog.

The objective of the Thompson Medstat Research Brief into "Lifestyle and Obesity" was to make sense of the "disparity between the perception of good health and the reality of ... expanding waist lines"; namely, the fact that "despite the cold facts —64.5 percent of American adults are overweight, 30.5 percent are obese, and 4.7 percent are morbidly obese — ... more than four out of five Americans characterized their eating habits as either 'very healthy' or 'somewhat healthy.'”

As far as I can see, the news reporters read the key findings of the report to wit: 75% of "obese respondents characterized their eating habits as 'very healthy' or 'somewhat healthy', and that 50% of all respondents (obese or otherise) exercised vigorously three times a week; had a good laugh and wrote that the respondents were in denial and/or didn't have a clue about what constitutes healthy eating and vigorous exercise.

In so doing, these reporters overlooked some key statistics within the survey:

• only 25% of obese respondents claimed "very healthy" eating habits, 50% said that they had "somewhat" healthy eating habits: no denial here in my opinion. These catogories were lumped together in the news stories as "healthy eating habits", significantly distorting the actual results of the survey.
• there was no evidence that obese respondents significantly abused fast food, "super sizing", or snacks as compared to the rest of the population
• with regard to exercise, twice as many overweight respondents reported vigorous exercise as compared to morbidly obese respondents, with obese respondents falling in between. Overweight respondents exercised at the same level as healthy weight respondents. All in all, there is nothing to suggest that obese respondents don't understand what constitutes vigorous exercise and whether or not they engage in such activity.

Indeed, the conclusions of the survey itself bear no resemblance whatever to the news reports:

"CONCLUSION
‘Sometimes’ is a very dangerous word
While very few respondents in any of the BMI categories consistently ate super-sized fast foods for the majority of their meals, snacked recklessly, or even characterized their eating habits as poor, several high risk behaviors have combined to become part of the average American’s weekly routine. Through a combination of occasional fast food meals, moderate snacking, not quite enough exercise and the belief that these habits are “somewhat healthy,” Americans are rationalizing themselves into ever-expanding waistlines."

It may well be that "Americans are rationalizing themselves into ever-expanding waistlines," but there is another possibility. As I have been hammering home again and again, as an overweight person myself I don't have a clue all right, but what I don't have clue about is when to stop eating. So those "high risk behaviors" could be as simple as an obese person's inability to keep a "running total" of calories eaten throughout the day.

Or it could be more like my own experience, wherein I did eat healthily, but I made no effort to control my calorie intake, for many reasons that didn't turn out to be true.