We just passed the 35th anniversary of the Web’s public debut (August 1991). I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it featured an ugly, annoying “Lose Belly Fat Now!” programmatic ad.
That might be a slight exaggeration, but the Federal Trade Commission has spent literally the past 100 years fighting a quixotic battle against marketers making specious claims about miracle weight loss cures.
All of which inspires some mixed feelings as I share with you the latest news about health, longevity, and being overweight.
First, the surprising good news: Writing in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, researchers say that after analyzing 14 years of data from 6,905 Americans age 65 and older, they discovered that adults who were classified as “overweight” had a lower risk of dying during the study period than their normal-weight peers.
Specifically, the overweight men tracked in this study had a 46% lower risk of dying from any cause compared to normal-weight men. Men with Class I or II obesity had a 51% lower risk.
For women, the difference was less pronounced: Overweight women had a 27% lower risk of dying from any cause compared to normal-weight women. Women with Class I or II obesity had a 15% lower estimated risk, although that result was not statistically significant.
But there was one big caveat: belly fat, measured here by waist circumference (WC).
For both men and women, high waist circumference correlated with a 24% higher risk of death during the study period, even after accounting for BMI and the demographic and health factors included in the analysis.
The statistical culprit here could be the way we calculate body mass index (BMI). As the authors wrote in the journal article:
Although BMI is simple and widely applied in clinical and epidemiologic settings, it does not distinguish between fat mass and lean mass, nor does it account for fat distribution.
In contrast, WC reflects abdominal adiposity, which has been shown to be more strongly associated with cardiometabolic risk than BMI alone.
Enter “the obesity paradox.” This is the finding that overweight, and in some cases obesity, can be associated with lower mortality among older adults.
Basically, you spend your whole life hearing that weight gain is bad and unhealthy.
But then, according to studies like this one, you reach a certain age and come away with the understanding that the whole thing flips. In fact, you you might conclude that losing weight is bad and unhealthy.
“BMI and waist circumference provide complementary information about health risk in older adults,” study co-author Bryan Blissmer, PhD, of the University of Rhode Island, said. “Our findings suggest that considering both measures together, rather than relying on BMI alone, may improve mortality risk assessment and support more informed clinical decision-making.”
The study covered the period 2011 to 2024, so the current era of widespread use of highly effective GLP-1 drugs for weight loss came very late in the study period.
So that might be a factor to address in the next study of its type.
And, we’ve seen plenty of prior studies suggesting that belly fat is especially bad for people at any age — although this is the first one I remember to focus specifically on longevity during a time period like this. All of which probably explains the century-old industry trying to convince people that unregulated miracle cures actually exist.
As Richard L. Cleland wrote in a publication of the Food & Drug Law Institute earlier this year: “Since filing its first case in 1926, [the FTC] has initiated at least 268 enforcement actions against companies and individuals.”
The dubious honor of being the first product targeted went to a cream called McGowan’s Reducine. Its makers ran an ad in a magazine called True Romances claiming that it could “literally dissolve excess fat, leaving the figure slim and properly rounded, giving the lithe grace to the body that every man and woman desires.”
As bad as belly fat apparently is, there’s something comforting about realizing that our great-grandparents were fighting the same battle of the bulge all those years ago.
Let’s check back here in another few decades and see what we’re convincing ourselves works by then.
Other things worth knowing …
Fox News: Voters don’t believe President Trump will make good on his new promise to send eligible Americans $5,000 dividend checks if Republicans maintain their majorities in the House and Senate this midterm cycle. The dividend proposal would require congressional approval, and it’s unclear where the money would come from to fund the program.
CNN: President Trump attacked Supreme Court justices as being beholden to “crazed” liberals in a lengthy online screed after the court blocked his plan to execute dramatic changes to mail-in voting ahead of the midterms. These are not the people I interviewed to serve … they are merely a shell of their original selves," Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday.
Bloomberg: OK, one more story about Trump and then we can move on: Trump has traded more securities than all 535 members of Congress combined since he returned to office — 28,700 trades in the 17 months compared to 22,200 — even as he seeks to pass a stock-purchasing ban for lawmakers that would exclude him from any restrictions, according to a Bloomberg review.
National Post: A new poll finds that 49% of Canadians support the idea of joining the European Union — something that would be impossible under current EU membership rules, since Canada isn’t in Europe. Still, about 81% support closer integration with the EU, including making it easier to trade, travel, work and study and to cooperate on security.
The Telegraph: The “pick-up artists” secretly filming women using smart glasses. AI glasses are enabling harassers to record women stealthily, posing a growing threat to privacy and online safety.
AFP via Yahoo: Authorities in New York announced Monday the seizure of a dozen prominent websites hosting pornographic celebrity deepfakes that featured politicians and actors. An online boom in non-consensual deepfakes is currently outpacing efforts to regulate the technology around the world due to a proliferation of AI tools, including “nudification” apps.
Futurism: Scientists say that the planet Mercury has been actively shrinking over the billions of years that it’s orbited the Sun. Now, as detailed in a new paper by a team of scientists from the German Aerospace Center’s Institute of Space Research, the planet’s shrivelling could be occurring at an even faster-than-expected rate, losing up to 14.5 miles of total diameter since it formed billions of years ago — anywhere from ten to 30 percent more than previously thought.
Thanks for reading. Photo by Sean S on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!