A study published in JAMA in November of 1993 ("Dietary Factors and Sedentary Lifestyle," McGinnis-Foege) found that "300,000 people die each year from illness related to dietary factors and sedentary lifestyle." The diet industry grabbed that statement, twisted it, and translated it to become "300,000 people are killed every year by obesity."

You can't read an article or watch a television report on obesity today without hearing the intimidating statement "300,000 deaths a year in the United States are caused by being overweight." This figure is usually accompanied by the now cliché film footage of fat bellies and butts to validate its truth. We are a society that accepts as gospel truth the accuracy of anything stated on a news program or in print.

The legs this "300,000" figure has serves as an example of how literally anyone can come up with a "fact" ignore other, disputing evidence, and watch their "fact" take on a life of its own. In this case, the "fact" is helped along by an aggressive diet industry, looking for any angle or scare tactic to get you to buy their product - one more time.

Does truth matter? Or is it more important to advance one's theories by picking and choosing at the cost of the health and well-being of millions of individuals?

Laura Fraser writes in her extremely well researched book Losing It: America's Obsession With Weight and the Industry That Feeds On It :

"The next claim worth examining is that obesity causes 300,000 excess deaths per year in the United States. This claim is based on an estimate, done by researchers Anne Wolf and Graham Colditz at Harvard Medical School, using data from the Nurses' Health Study (the same study from which the Harvard researcher JoAnne Manson claimed that being 10 or 20 pounds overweight led to an increased risk of early death. Based on the number of women who died from various diseases, and their body weight, the researchers extrapolated that obesity was the direct cause, nationwide, of 171,490 coronary heart disease deaths, 39,679 diabetes deaths, 53,087 cancer deaths, and 10,000 cerebrovascular deaths per year.

..."But the problem with this kind of analysis, say other researchers, is that you can't make a direct cause-and-effect link between obesity and diseases. Just because people who are fat are more likely to die of cancer doesn't mean that their fatness caused the cancer. Other lifestyle factors that tend to go along with obesity, which the researchers in the Nurses' Health Study did not take into account -- such as a lack of exercise or a high-fat diet -- may have contributed to the deaths, not the fatness itself. Studies on obese people who exercise, for instance -- who live longer than lean people who don't exercise -- may prove that inactivity is the cause of many of the problems we associate with obesity, not obesity. Steven Blair, an exercise physiologist at the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas has done studies that show that if you exercise, your weight (up to a BMI of 40) doesn't put you at any increased risk for early death at all. It may turn out that obesity is, for the most part, a red herring in the health debate.

..."Nobody ever dies of obesity," says David Levitsky, a nutrition and obesity expert at Cornell University. Obesity, he says, is often a marker for other health problems caused by a sedentary lifestyle, but is itself not necessarily dangerous. 'If you're a large person and you do not suffer from any other health problems, then there is no reason for you to lose weight.'"

What this means, in real life terms, is that diet companies and puppet spokesmen can continue to sell their useless, unsuccessful, and harmful programs to a frightened public. This figure can help to line their pockets as they fool legislators into creating a misguided "war on fat."

We must be skeptical when hearing what comes out of the mouths of people who stand to make a lot of money from getting us frightened into buying their products. We must we wary and questioning of research. How was it set up? Who paid for it? How valid are the interpretations? And we must be concerned about the impact of the statements that are made. Hearing them repeated as handy sound bytes doesn't make them true.

Watching these "facts" being used as a basis for discrimination against fat people is unacceptable. Allowing yourself to be judged by them is medically unsound. Do your own research. Find resources you can trust to at least present other interpretations.

This "300,000" figure is bogus. Being fat isn't the problem. An unhealthy lifestyle, in people of all sizes, is. But saying fat is the problem sells a lot of those nasty Jenny Craig dinners.

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An Update 

"Actual Causes of Death in the United States, 2000," by Ali H. Mokdad, Ph.D; James S. Marks, MD, MPH; Donna F. Stroup, PhD, MSc; Julie L. Gerberding, MD, MPH. Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Vol. 291, No. 10, March 10, 2004.

Using mortality data reported to the CDC the authors of this article linked the following risk behaviors and mortality. The study was based on epidemiological, clinical, and laboratory studies. You will note, as stated above, it is poor diet and physical inactivity - NOT obesity - listed as the cause of (now) 112,000 deaths a year, making the CDC chart below inaccurate in a big way.

Tobacco - 435,000 deaths (18.1 % of total US deaths)
Poor diet and physical inactivity - 400,000 deaths (16.6 %)
Alcohol consumption - 85,000 deaths (3.5 %)
Microbial agents - 75,000
Toxic agents - 55,000
Motor vehicle crashes - 43,000
Firearms - 29,000
Sexual behaviors - 20,000
Illicit drug use - 17,000

A Further Update

The truth finally comes out. You can read the information above to hear the background of what I'm about to tell you here. What it comes down to is this: As of April, 2005, the Centers for Disease Control has had to retract their "400,000 deaths a year attributed to poor diet and inactivity" figure to 112,000. Seems there was a miscalculation made somewhere along the line. 

After over a decade of the diet industry touting their unreliable, ineffective programs and products as the answer to saving fat people from a certain untimely death, they are going to have to move to another scare tactic. (Well, actually, they won't. You will continue to hear the same figure dropped into commercials and discussions with the assumption that you will not have heard the retraction and revised figure.) 

Oh, and here's a surprise that hadn't been mentioned before. Turns out folks who are overweight but not in the "obese" category have a lower risk of death than folks in the "normal" weight range. 

This brings us back to the reality that eating poorly and being inactive - traits common to fat, normal, and thin people alike - are serious problems. In fact, these risk factors come in right around the same level as that associated with alcohol consumption (85,000 deaths). And, again, obesity was never listed as a cause of death in either study that originally claimed 300,000 and 400,000 deaths. 

It's all about lifestyle, not weight. People of all sizes must work on increasing their activity levels to a reasonable amount. People of all sizes need to eat a healthy diet. 

See the April 2005 issues of Journal of the American Medical Association for further information. 

Also, you might be interested in this letter to the CDC from the Center for Consumer Freedom for further information: click here.