That’s what Risa Lavizzo-Mouro, President and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation said at last June’s obesity in summit in June.

It’s a pretty astounding thing to say, when you think about it. Lavizzo-Mouro was basically saying that we should take drastic action when it comes to public policy addressing obesity, even though we don’t know all the facts yet.

And now, finally, the CDC admits that even the facts we do have have been exaggerated.

I and lots of other people have been telling you for months now that this widely-reported number in the media — that 400,000 people die every year due to obesity — comes from one, lonely study, and that that study has some very serious methodology problems. Still, the media paid little attention to the criticisms. Using that number, we’ve told over and over that “obesity is about to overtake smoking as America’s numuber one preventable killer.” A Lexis search for “obesity” and “400,000″ kicks back over 1,600 results in the last two years.

Guess what? The CDC now admits that that number was wrong. Grossly inflated by — guess what? — bad methodology.

Reading the NY Times tends to get one all the more infuriated.

Dr. Glantz estimates that the number of deaths from obesity to be more like 100,000 than 400,000. And the inflated numbers of obesity deaths, he added, represent ” a very, very fundamental mistake that was made in the paper, which they have done nothing to address.”

“This is not some esoteric little detail over which there is huge uncertainty,” he said…

…Dr. Oliver, for example, said obesity, like tobacco, had little effect on mortality in people over 65. So with two million deaths a year in the United States, 70 percent of which are among people over 65, virtually every younger person who dies would have to die from obesity. “The numbers simply don’t add up,” he said.

That is the same argument made by two statisticians at the disease control agency, Dr. David Williamson and Dr. Katherine Flegal, who published papers this year reporting that the statistics used to calculate the obesity deaths were wrong.

They noted that the way to estimate deaths from obesity was to look at each age group and ask how many deaths might be due to obesity and then add the numbers to get the total deaths. That is the way the agency calculated tobacco deaths, coming up with a figure of 435,000. But for obesity, the agency looked at the death risk in younger people and extrapolated it to the entire population. “

And actually, that’s only the beginning of the problems with the 400,000 figure.

What’s infuriating is that the NY Times and other media outlets never talked to theGlen Gaessers of the world back when all of this obesity hysteria first hit. They were saying the same thing then. It isn’t until the government agency that oversees the obesity crisis admits it screwed up that the media seeks out critics and looks at the methodology more carefully.

Given that Medicare just approved what amounts to an “obesity benefit” that cost billions, and that anti-fat cops are calling for a soup-to-nuts range of legislation aimed at taking choice away from consumers and imposing expensive penalities on the food industry, it would have been great to see some media skepticism earlier on.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 24th, 2004 at 7:51 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.