Gordo y feliz

Es para matarse de risa.

Hace unos días comentaba por acá sobre la ironía de que justo ahora que declaramos una epidemia global a la obesidad y creamos la policía alimenticia nos venimos a enterar de que cierto exceso de peso baja el riesgo de muerte.

Más del tema:

It's been a tough time the last little while for the fatties among us -- which is supposedly most of us. According to the just released report from the American Institute for Cancer Research being fat and eating certain foods increases our risk for cancer. The secret to a long life according to the report's authors is to be as thin as you can, while avoiding red meat, processed meats, alcohol, French fries, milk shakes and, well, you get the picture.

But in contrast to the cancer report, which received enormous and largely uncritical media attention, a new study about obesity by Katherine Flegal and colleagues from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Cancer Institute made few waves. Yet Flegal's quiet and careful study could do much to calm our growing national hysteria about obesity.

Flegal used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which is a representative sample of the US population, to find the connections between being underweight, overweight and obese and cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer and many other causes of death. The results are startling since they confound much of the received wisdom about being fat in America.