Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

There is an obesity problem in America, and is possibly a burden on healthcare. Yet at the same time, the threat of obesity at the individual level is overstated by experts and the diet, fitness, and health industry which oversells the danger of obesity . Unless you are so overweight that you find it hard to move and have to use a scooter or something, the number of years lost to obesity is not that much, maybe 2 or 3. I see plenty of obese fully functioning people well into their 80s. Henry Kissinger is anexample. Another is William Shatner, aged 90. The number of years lost due to obesity is much less than smoking or chronic alcohol consumption. Having to constantly count calories and do tons of exercise for those 2-3 extra years is possibly not worth it. Bigger humans may be the default now owing to increased prosperity.Humans were thinner 100+ years ago due to not enough food.

I don't know when or by how much the effect on life expectancy that obesity has is overstated -- funnily enough I think the same is true of smoking -- but one thing I'm more sure of is that obesity is likely to greatly decrease the quality of, say, the latter half of your life. It's just not very fun to have diabetes, "minor" strokes and heart attacks, or the various less-scary but very uncomfortable issues that obesity greatly contributes to. A nice way a friend of mine put it once is that you want to compress all the morbidity you'll experience into the last few years of your life, and being active and lean goes a long way there.

That simply not true at all

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult/causes.html#:~:text=People...

that doesn't refute what I said at all. It shows increased risk for certain conditions, which in the end amounts to just a few lost years. As it turns out, plenty of average or underweight people get those conditions too.

> the number of years lost to obesity is not that much

Compared to what? To merely overweight people, to normal BMI range of 18-25, or to optimal BMI range of 20-22?

average BMI.

But the average BMI is already counting obese and overweight people so it's biased if you want to compare lethality or numbers of years lost to a baseline.

Consider if everyone was obese, with your calculation you would say the number of years lost is zero.

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