>From: Spike Jones <spike66@ibm.net>
>
> > Michael S. Lorrey wrote: ...the fact is that thin people have a higher
> > mortality than normal or slightly heavy people (though obese people do
> > have the highest mortality).
>
>Mike how do we filter out those who are thin *because* they
>are unhealthy? All your cancer deaths would be recorded as
>thin, when they mighta been fat before they got sick. How do you
>filter out the effects of smoking, since smoking causes increased
>metabolic rates and presumably thinner bodies? Heroin users
>often get really thin before they die. AIDS patients, etc, I could
>go on but will not.
>
>I would suggest that the famous curve you describe which
>shows higher mortality for thin people reflects the fact that
>it is difficult or impossible to find out a corpse's *normal*
>weight when it was healthy. What we need is an army
>of volunteers to use a device that records our weight every
>day, for decades. spike
My guess would be that, in addition to all the reasons Spike points out,
thin people would typically eat less and, as a result, suffer nutritionally.
While calorie restriction is probably a good thing *if* you do it right,
most people (including me) probably don't have the knowledge and/or
discipline to pull it off correctly.
-Zero
"I like dreams of the future better than the history of the past"
--Thomas Jefferson
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