I’m not about to poo-poo health findings, but I will question them, especially if they don’t make sense. There have certainly been enough false findings or disproved health crazes to make me look closely at the data – come on, look at coffee. It’s good for you, it’s bad for you, it’s a force of evil, it’s a salvation for your brain. And that’s just in one year of recent research.
So while I am considering that obesity really is linked to cancer, there’s a major hole in the data that even my untrained eye can find. Frankly, I think we’re going to wind up on even more of a merry-go-round, because there is so much medically unsound moral judgment attached to an assessment of our body size these days.
First, I don’t see a whole lot of fat people in chemo – at least, not ones who stay fat, considering what chemo does to your body.
Second, none of this study is from fresh data. It’s taken from an analysis of 7,000 studies on cancer done by other scientists over the past 10 years. For those who are familiar with lab procedure, it’s tough for me to buy that all 7,000 were completely valid, unbiased, and in no way funded by a pharmaceutical company with a diet drug to push.
Third, two-thirds of cancer cases are still thought to have no connection whatsoever to lifestyle. So yes, there’s some things you can do – especially exercise to clear your bodies of toxins – but unlike smoking, where you’re pretty much giving your body its cancer chemicals dose, there’s no guarantee you will or won’t get cancer no matter how fat you are.
Eat right and exercise? I support that, 100%. I’m even really working on myself, including diet changes and working in more exercise time. But weight should be removed as the end goal in making these changes – weight fluctuation is a side effect, and we’ll get scads healthier the minute we move our focus from arbitrary numbers on a scale to how effectively our bodies work when, say, climbing a flight of stairs or walking ten blocks to a bus stop.
Debbie at the Body Impolitic experienced many of the same flags I did on this study of metadata – and has some better research on why this is more B.S.
