Attempts to make fat a treatable disease keep running into minor
problems called new medical research. First, the CDC’s
headline-grabbing “400,000 deaths from obesity” was scaled back. Then another CDC report
in April dropped that number to 100,000 while also finding that the
significantly smaller population of underweight persons had 33,000
deaths (overweight led to 86,000 fewer deaths in the same study). Now a new study
shows that overweight individuals without high blood pressure have no
additional risk of heart attack than those at normal weight. As one of
the researchers stated,
“The important message in our study is that we observed that
cardiovascular risk is not clearly increased unless hypertension is
present in these overweight and obese subjects,” said Athanases
Benetos, M.D., Ph.D., of the Medical School of Nancy. “In our
population, if the subject didn’t have hypertension we didn’t find that
the subject had an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.”
Some doctors, including one associated with the study, still insist that weight causes diabetes and other health problems
However, Dr. Benetos said it is difficult to determine which comes first — fat
or hypertension. “The curse of obesity is that as weight goes up, risk
factors go up as well, yet blood pressure does appear to be the key
factor.” Thus, he said, the best way to reduce risk is “treatment that
targets both blood pressure and weight reduction.”
Of course, there could be other factors
that cause both obesity and hypertension, and the weight is just a
signal of other health problems in the same way that being a columnist
for the New York Times is a signal of muddled thinking.
