Holiday Scares

So I'm looking at the paper on Thanksgiving – and on the front page is your typical holiday scare story about how holiday dining can be deadly on dieting. ("Americans," I'm told, "are generally clueless when it comes to proper portions." But with so much emphasis these days placed on counting calories or carbs or whatever, I tend to take such blanket pronouncements with more than a grain of Mrs. Dash.) Buried five pages in the same paper is an AP story correcting a Center for Disease Control study released last spring stating that obesity was about to overtake smoking as the No. 1 cause of death in the U.S. Apparently, said much-publicized study contained a number of errors, according to the Wall Street Journal, which included counting total deaths from a year outside the study. The study claimed that the number of so-called "obesity-related" deaths was 400,000, but at least 80,000 of these deaths were apparently "overstated."

I must add I'm skeptical about most of the remaining 320,000. At one point in the story, we're told that "poor diet and physical inactivity" were responsible for the burgeoning fatality rate – but that's hardly equivalent to being fat. A fat body may be a side effect of poor diet and non-exercise, but it isn't consistently so. So how many of these deaths are really related to obesity itself? Considering the CDC's readiness to jump on a set of unchecked numbers that already supported a preconceived conclusion, I'm not sure we'll ever really know. I do know that next Thanksgiving, I'll probably be reading another variation on the same dumb diet story on the front page of my newspaper.

Hope you all had a well-proportioned Thanksgiving out there. . .