brazil84 comments on Calorie Restriction: My Theory and Practice - Less Wrong

7 Post author: brazil84 12 February 2014 01:16AM

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Comment author: brazil84 15 February 2014 07:57:00PM 0 points [-]

My concern is particularly describing "thin" as healthy, or low risk for mortality. If by "thin" you mean BMI 18-25, then I'm with you,

I didn't precisely define the word "thin," but what I had in mind was "not fat." I suppose that BMI 18-25 is roughly what I mean by "thin." I consider myself to be "thin" even though my BMI of 24 puts me close to the official line for "overweight."

(You suggested "being fat puts a lot of abnormal extra strain on your system almost all the time"; I suspect being thin does too, since it means your body will your body will struggle to find sufficient metabolic resources for things like healing processes, regeneration, the immune system and cellular repair mechanisms.)

Depending on your definition of "thin," I would agree with you. And it's part of the reason I am not engaging in what I have defined as "severe calorie restriction."

The curves on that graph for "healthy subjects who never smoked" should exclude people with unhealthy conditions and diseases that affect their weight

I doubt that they do so completely. Between people lying about their health and simply being unaware of latent serious health problems, I am pretty confident that the curves for "healthy people who never smoked" include a decent number of people who are actually not healthy.

One can also reasonably interpret the data to find "being low socio-economic status" as a causal factor of both higher BMI and higher mortality risk.

It would depend what data you are looking at. If you look at the entire universe of general knowledge and common sense, this seems unlikely -- at least as the primary factor.

Comment author: dougclow 15 February 2014 08:27:24PM *  0 points [-]

I consider myself to be "thin" even though my BMI of 24 puts me close to the official line for "overweight."

Aha! I think we've found the main source of our disagreement here, and it's purely terminology. Totally agree that maintaining a BMI around 24 is a reasonable, broadly-supported aspiration (all other factors being equal), particularly if you're younger than middle age.

this seems unlikely -- at least as the primary factor

Agreed it's probably not the largest effect, but I do think there's good reason to think there is an effect going that way. There seems to be a growing amount of evidence that low socio-economic status is bad for mortality, mostly indirectly (makes you more likely to do things like smoking, eating a diet with less fresh fruit and vegetables, etc) but also directly (low social status makes you die sooner), although of course separating that out of any naturalistic data is hard. (See e.g. this, and the older Whitehall studies.)

Comment author: brazil84 15 February 2014 08:33:50PM 0 points [-]

There seems to be a growing amount of evidence that low socio-economic status is bad for mortality, mostly indirectly (makes you more likely to do things like smoking, eating a diet with less fresh fruit and vegetables, etc)

This is subject to the same cause and effect issues you alluded to earlier. It's reasonable to hypothesize that worse-than-average impulse control is likely to result in both low socio-economic status and overweight/obesity.

Anyway, for my purposes it doesn't really matter. The evidence is strong enough that at a minimum I'm willing to stake my health on the claim that it's better for one's health to avoid getting fat.

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