[extropy-chat] Overweight people live longer

[Robin Hanson]

At 12:42 PM 4/20/2005, Hal Finney wrote:
>According to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical
>Association, moderately overweight people actually have lower mortality
>rates than people of supposedly ideal weights.  The study is available
>for free access at http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/293/15/1861 ...
>All in all it is an exciting result and it is always good to see the
>conventional wisdom being overturned, especially on a matter where public
>health officials have been scolding Americans for years. ..

It is nice to see further support, but data showing this have been available
for a while, and I expect conventional wisdom to remain unchanged, as usual.
I have taught this, and many other things that violate conventional wisdom
but are well known to specialists, in my health economics course.  But
even my students usually leave the course with the same conventional wisdom
they came into it with.  Especially regarding medicine, people believe what
they want to believe, and ignore the evidence.



Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323