[Villages PL]

This column is in todays newspaper (Jan. 29, 2013) and the heading is: Overweight people live the longest, not the best.

As I suggested in the thread heading it's interesting but I also think it's likely to be confusing to many people. Dr. Lipschitz has written some very good columns but I don't think this is one of them. It misses the mark.

The article compares overweight people to thin people but it seems that little, if any, attention was paid to nutrition. After all, he's a medical doctor and he bases the column on a study that was published in the "Journal of the American Medical Association". And since when are they all that concerned with nutrition? They're not. If this was about nutrition, the study would have been published in a nutrition journal.

So when they compare thin people to overweight people it's likely they are not taking nutrition into account. People can be thin because they eat a careful/healthy diet (no empty calories) or they can be thin because they are sickly as the result of eating a poor diet (not to mention smoking or heavy drinking etc.).

This seems like "reductionism" where they study one thing in isolation. It's based solely on weight and therefore it's a meaningless study.