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Comment by PuppyTailWags | Hacker News Reader

Have we actually studied if the weight loss is resulting in better health outcomes for the people in question? Outside of diabetics (there is evidence that significant weight loss can relieve the effects of type 2 diabetes), I would like to know if just weight loss benefits the cardiovascular system, blood pressure, etc. These aren't as intuitive as we'd like, for example, it turns out that low fat diets didn't make people less fat, and cholesterol-lowering medication doesn't reduce heart disease.

I'm hesitant to measure weight loss as a pure good in of itself because it isn't evident to me that just losing weight has a causative effect on reducing specific diseases.

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My wife lost a hundred pounds via bariatric surgery; resting heart rate dropped by 20, cholesterol dropped into normal range, knee and hip pain disappeared, and it even helped the chronic migraine substantially.

We've got plenty of clear evidence that being significantly overweight has health impacts.

Yup. On a much lesser note, when I lost 10lbs I noticed acid reflux symptoms disappear and blood pressure was lowered. For someone that is borderline on need of medication, the doc basically said lose some weight and these issues could go away (for some time). Its incentive enough for me to keep losing so I can push off the major diseases until much later in life or never.

Yeah, there are a lot of published studies showing this is very impactful. Within certain thresholds, losing weight has been shown to be the biggest change to all cause mortality rates. If you are obese, the most impactful thing on health is losing weight. This obviously isn't true for people with very low BMIs, but there have been a lot of population level studies looking at all cause mortality.

What are the certain thresholds? Can we be more specific than lowered all-cause mortality, such as specific diseases we know have causal relationships with obesity specifically? I'm asking because I'm not that educated, but if you know there are studies showing e.g. purely losing weight with no lifestyle changes means less heart attacks, less joint replacements, less cancer, etc. please share.

Caveat: it's generally not possible to "lose weight with no lifestyle changes." Even taking anti-obesity drugs results in lifestyle changes along with the weight loss.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12457296/

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/74/5/579/4737391

https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(16)...

https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j4849

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

This is exactly what I was looking for, huge thanks.

>it turns out that low fat diets didn't make people less fat

This is not a "turns out". Anyone who believed that just having a "low fat" diet will make them leaner, didn't really know how losing fat works. Fat is a macronutrient (and quite useful one) just making it lower tells you absolutely nothing on its own.

>>it turns out that low fat diets didn't make people less fat

Yeah, but low calorie diets (lower than your daily calories expenditure) always do.

Wtf are you on? Of course losing weight results in a better life. If nothing else it will make moving a lot easier it doesn’t need to reduce any diseases if it does that is pure bonus

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