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eirenicon comments on The Obesity Myth - Less Wrong
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Obese women 'significantly more likely to have children with birth defects' .
Women are getting more beautiful. "Beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts."
Taller men... are more likely to father children. Tall men are less likely to be obese. Not a direct correlation though. Tall men also tend to earn more.
Just some results that may help shed more light on this. Without better data I don't want to make any definitive statements, though.
I call BS. <google> Wikipedia backs my play.
Granted, but that particular claim is not especially relevant to this conversation, nor does Wikipedia's article on Kanazawa refute Jokela's findings. My purpose for linking to that wasn't to highlight the "women are getting more more beautiful" headline but simply to draw a connection from the claim that beautiful women reproduce more to the conclusion that obese women would therefore reproduce less. I don't back this claim, because I haven't read the paper, but unverified data is better than no data.
Having lived there and read up on problems with it, I find UK science reporting to be pretty awful, even compared to American science reporting.
The "birth defect" one is explained entirely in percentage change. Indeed, they are alarmed by the fact that deaths due to heart disease during pregnancy have doubled. They've doubled from .001% to .002% of all pregnancies. They don't even mention natural frequencies for birth defects, but they all sound rather rare.
The women are getting more beautiful thing is similar - it sounds more like the product of a scientist with good PR than a scientist with good data (note the tone of the article, as if women should be celebrating. But none of them are getting any more attractive; they are thoroughly done evolving.). Also, attractiveness is positional, so if more people are less attractive, those people's standards are likely to change to include one another. I can't access the gated article or I'd break down their "objective measurements of beauty," but BMI does not seem like a great proxy for beauty, particularly given the positional nature of the whole thing. And that researcher and his methodology have been criticized, for example here and here.
Height tends to correlate with both income and social class, which inversely correlate with obesity. Also note the article's failure to say how big an effect there is. Also note that tall men don't necessarily have more descendants, since taller women are less likely to have children, and (I'm pretty sure) taller men have taller daughters.