Another study shows that regular exercise can prevent obesity’s onset. What I find strange about the reporting is only the fact that this is yet another in a long string of studies which have established this point, while they act like it’s sort of new. Virtually all the research supports the idea that you can reduce the risk of obesity and/or moderate its effects with regular physical activity.
If I had more energy I think I’d go look for the actual study. Science reporting in this country is simply abysmal.
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I’m pretty sure science reporting everywhere is abysmal.
All the incentives and practical factors align against good science reporting.
Doing it right doesn’t generate any benefits for the producers, and doing it half-assedly is a lot cheaper and easier… and might actually generate direct benefits by driving traffic.
the article is open access, and can be found here:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000332
from what i can tell, they look at several genetic factors that are known to contribute to obesity, and determine to what extent exercise can overcome those genetic factors and attenuate someone’s risk of becoming obese. in other words, they are exploring the interaction between exercise and genetics in determining someone’s weight – which, according to them, was something not known (or at least not well studied).
I don’t know what level of science you can find on Yahoo!Health.
All I know about obesity and physical exercise is based on my own experiences and those of Stefi Harris, my wife.
First, I know that 1 lb of body weight equals 3500 calories.
Second, I know that physical exercize without careful and continuous dieting is like smoking a pack of cigarettes, then claiming you are conquering the tobacco habit.
Third, I’ve been doing more or less daily workouts at one of the big fitness centers in Madison for the past 14-1/2 years, and for the past eight years or so, eating in accordance with a good dietary plan I worked out with my wife and one of the staff dieticians at Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin. You must stick with these diets, or it all comes to nothing.
Fourth, I worked off the body fat from about 215 lbs to the low 160 lbs range over the years, and for the first time since I was a kid many, many decades ago, I’m wearing size 34 regular fit Arizona Original Jeans. With room enough leftover for me to hook both thumbs in my belt.
Now when I look around almost everywhere I go, everybody looks fatter. I don’t gloat about it. I just know it.
I don’t know or really care about what works for the rest of the world. If it works for me, that’s it.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Nice that the article is open-access, but that’s the exception. Usually, when media cites a piece of academic research, the only way to get it is pay $25 or so for one-time access or to be a journal subscriber–VERY expensive.
I think research which is partly or wholly tax funded should be required to be available on the Internet for free, with exceptions only in the case of security classification or (maybe) corporate proprietary data. It is ridiculous that academia is now more closed than so many other information sources.
In the majority of media sources, you don’t get science information until it has been packaged, and presented in the right way to get you to buy the product they are trying to sell with it.
They also take it upon themselves, frequently, to “make it comprehensible,” which in the case of most science journalists means dumbing it down and getting it wrong.
There are a small handful of journalists who report on science rigorously and correctly. They are a treasure to read when you find them.
The researchers found that each additional BMI-increasing allele was associated with an increase in BMI equivalent to 445 g in body weight for a person 1.70 m tall and that the size of this effect was greater in inactive people than in active people. In individuals who have a physically active lifestyle, this increase was only 379 g/allele, or 36% lower than in physically inactive individuals in whom the increase was 592 g/allele.
Am I reading this right? There was a “significant” whopping 36% decrease in “obesity” in physically active persons that amounted to a whole 0.4lbs???
Yeah – that’ll get me on the treadmill.
Science reporting is truly a joke. There’s a big difference between statistical and clinical significance.
Would anybody here really give a damn if they were told the difference was less than half a pound?
So, this isn’t a fat joke?
maggie – you are not reading it right. it’s 0.4 lbs per allele. Most people had >10 alleles. Still maybe not running to the treadmill, but just to be 100% clear.
David – open-access is increasingly becoming the norm. the downside is that it now costs about $1000 to have your work published in an open-access journal, versus voluntary page-charges in most closed-access journals. I believe NIH recently required that all NIH-funded work be available through pubmed no later than 12 months after publication.
That aside, though, what technical information sources are more open? You think the private sector publishes even 1% of its results publicly without an enforceable patent in hand? If you’re dying for an article, most university libraries have subscriptions to a broad range of journals and also generally have generous terms for community use of materials.
So active fat folks are a whopping 4 lbs lighter than fat couch potatos. Does that really warrant the conclusion that exercise will prevent the onset of obesity?
maggie,
There’s a whole other section of the study that discusses the effect of exercise on moderating the risk of a person with x pro-obesity alleles, showing that being “highly active” reduces your risk by ~30%.
My observation is that they tend to “dumb down” pretty much everything to the level which they think the average person (who has a High School/GED/non-science Bachelor’s degree) will understand (The Onion’s video on Time is pretty spot on); unfortunately most of the populace is more advanced than that level and more intelligent than most journalists.
Read the study Zach. OMG – I can’t believe they call these exercises in mathematical manipulation “science”. What a crock. They had a whole lot of missing data – so what did they do? They guessed. That’s right – they “modeled” what they thought the data might be for 7677 people! Further for some reason they excluded people with diabetes and gained a lot of weight. WTF???
Maggie,
They must have learned their methodology form a lot of the “global warming” crowd of scientists.
maggie –
modeling is wholly appropriate in this case, given that the “missing data” (people who did not return for follow-up study) were representative of the dataset as a whole. i.e. it wasn’t that all the fat people dropped out.
people with diabetes have a confounding factor that this study was not trying to address. i don’t see anything wrong with leaving those outliers out of the data.
My point is – this “study” has very little to do with the headline.
It demonstrated a very small effect on weight for physical activity on non-obese folks with obesity associated genes and touted it as a significant finding in the fight against obesity.
Folks will read the headline and think that if they have fat genes and exercise they will be 40% less likely to be obese. The study demonstrates no such thing.
> Folks will read the headline and think that if they have fat genes and exercise they will be 40% less likely to be obese.
If a story relies on numbers, an innumerate person should not be allowed near the story, much less the headline.
Most j-school graduates are innumerate. Most stories rely on numbers. Err, you do the (fuzzy) math.
Yours,
Wince
Most J-school types are also scientific illiterates and legal illiterates; they do understand celebrities and politics which is where the (largely useless) j-schools should point them.
If I want to read an article on science, law, or anything involving numbers I’ll read something by either a person experienced in the field (like a petrochemical engineer to talk about the oil industry) or someone who has at least some formal education in the area (chemists, geologists)
actually maggie that’s exactly what the study demonstrates. that if a non-obese person has fat genes and they exercise, their risk for obesity drops by about 30%.
as for the reporting, that is not the fault of the study. i mean say what you want about the significance of the findings – that’s your own opinion. the science and methodology seem correct to me.
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