Ravenwood - 04/20/05 07:00 AM
Apparently being fat isn't all that bad after all. They even noted that people who carry a few extra pounds actually live longer.
Being overweight is nowhere near as big a killer as the government thought, ranking No. 7 instead of No. 2 among the nation's leading preventable causes of death, according to a startling new calculation from the CDC.Overstating the problem by 1400%, is just a tad more than the usual plus or minus 3% margin of error. It makes me wonder how wrong they've been on other things, like smoking.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated today that packing on too many pounds accounts for 25,814 deaths a year in the United States. As recently as January, the CDC came up with an estimate 14 times higher: 365,000 deaths.
Category: Pleasure Police
Comments (3) top link me
Why stop there? Think about how wrong they have been on existing.
Posted by: DaveJ at April 20, 2005 4:10 PMStatistics isn't science. In fact statistics is based on a false assertion. And of course you can do it badly, which may easily be the case here.
There's also an unremarked-on fact about our growing knowledge base : if you do experiments to 99% confidence, even if the false assumption were true, it means that out of the 100,000 experiments done each year, a _thousand_ things we know as a result are wrong. Each year.
Soon we have a vast store of garbage knowledge, which can be tapped for this or that purpose, to prove anything at all.
The usual protection, skeptical mockery, is not supplied by the news media in response to the press release.
Think how wrong they've been on other falsehoods that have become conventional wisdom.
Legislation should never be passed on research taken with policy changes in mind--which means most of it. The fat of the land is getting lean. It's time to fire science activists from the public trough and find them useful work in food service or retail.
Posted by: Brett at April 23, 2005 1:05 PM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
