From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Wed Apr 05 2000 - 23:32:58 MDT
> 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
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