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Comment by robododo | Hacker News Reader

I found it really interesting that someone piped up in the blog comments disagreeing with the measure for overweight: "Since so-called overweight – BMI 25-30 – is the longest-lived cohort, parents aren’t the only ones with screwed up perceptions, IMO."

Denial's everywhere, I guess.

Tangentially related: I was buying a coat as a gift for my mother, and was perplexed by the sizes. So I went to my local expert: Me: "What's up with all the women's sizes? They're all 1-X, 2-X, etc." Wife: "Oh, 'woman' sizes mean fat. Misses means normal." Me: DOES NOT COMPUTE

So even sizes in stores work to make people feel they're ok. 1X isn't "extra large" It's "woman sized". WTF?

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Seemingly every aspect of the womens' clothing/fashion industry is an exercise in perverse psychological torture.

Denial's everywhere, I guess.

Assuming that the claim is true that people with a BMI of 25-30 live longer than any other BMI range, how is believing that claim denial? Or in other words, what do you think that poster is denying?

So even sizes in stores work to make people feel they're ok. 1X isn't "extra large" It's "woman sized". WTF?

There are communities where that's considered a good thing. I recall an episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun where one character was looking for a dress, and was dismayed to find that the standard sizes were designed to make women fill overweight and inadequate (it turned out that the store had been taken over by impossibly-thin supermodel aliens, IIRC).

If the trade-off is between being happy and size X, but dying early, or unhappy and size X, and dying early, which is better? How do you convince people to be happy about where they are by being happy about where they're going?

Bringing up conflicting evidence in a scientific discussion is denial?

Bringing up a single piece of conflicting evidence and using it to declare the other side to be completely wrong is definitely denial.

I don't read that as declaring the other side completely wrong. That study was for people a little bit overweight, while the apparent delusion of parents extends into the very overweight. Even the phrasing of "aren't the only ones with distorted perceptions" suggests that both sides have their failures.

This may just be a pessimal interpretation of humanity, but I definitely read that sort of flip response as a quick way to dismiss the entire side's merits, attempting to show that they have an obvious agenda, are ignoring something obvious that shows they're wrong, etc. I certainly could be misinterpreting.

Conflicting evidence? I honestly don't get what you're saying.

I believe the OP was referring to this research. http://www.oregonlive.com/health/index.ssf/2009/06/portland_...

The methedology of the original 2005 study has been questioned. To me it sounds like the researches may have conflated weight loss caused by illness with having a low BMI at time of death.

"... epidemiologists from the ACS (American Cancer Society), American Heart Association, Harvard School of Public Health, and other organizations raised specific methodologic questions about the recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study and presented analyses of other data sets. The main concern ... is that it did not adequately account for weight loss from serious illnesses such as cancer and heart disease ... [and] failed to account adequately for the effect of smoking on weight ... As a result, the Flegal study underestimated the risks from obesity and overestimated the risks of leanness."

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/505703 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction

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