Last week, a story hit the wires announcing — ominously — that cancer had overtaken heart disease as the nation’s number one killer. Egad! Must be all that environmental pollution. Or secondhand smoke. Or…um…obesity.

Not quite. Actually, cancer rates are down. They’ve dropped every year for the last fifteen years. Deaths from cancer have dropped every year per year for the last fifteen years, too.

What’s going on? Heart disease is down more. In fact, heart disease, stroke, and cardiovascular disease are all down dramatically, in virtually every state in the country (only D.C. has seen an increase in cardiovascular disease since 1990, and all but three states have seen a drop in stroke incidence).

The funny thing is, this has all been happening for 15 years. But according to the government, we’ve been getting progressively fatter for 25 years, and that thickening is supposed to portend a looming health care crisis.

It’s just not happening. If you click on “more,” I’ve attached a few graphs from a PowerPoint presentation I give on obesity.

The point of the graphs is not to suggest that obesity is healthy (though there’s some evidence that a few extra pounds have preventative effects, particularly among African-Americans and the elderly, and among pre-menapausal women with respect to breast cancer). And I’ll readily concede that the gains we’ve made in combating both diseases would likely be even greater if fewer people were obese.

But if we’re facing the crisis the fat nannies and government officials say we are, and this has been going on for a quarter century, we should at least be seeing the front end of that crisis by now. Fact is, we just aren’t.

Slight caveat — these numbers use the Body Mass Index to determine “overweight” and “obese” — a flawed system, to say the least.

Yeah, we’re getting pudgier. We’re also living longer. The race breakdowns are interesting because black women have on average put on more weight over this period than white women, but have added more to their life expectancy. Same with black men as compared to white men.

All three are consistently down across the country.

These are the ten types of cancer most associated with obesity. Deaths from nine of them are down over the last decade.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 26th, 2005 at 7:42 pm 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.