site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

But it’s not just cancer patients. Peripheral vascular disease too.

As your study says:

Recent studies conducted in patients with chronic diseases have reported an inverse association between body mass index (BMI) and mortality.

So where doesn't it? A dozen specific explanations aren't satisfactory.

Like regular ice cream and alcohol consumption, overweight BMI is one of those things that annoy modern medicine by stubbornly correlating with lower mortality.

One more reason I give the poor bastards ice cream, beyond the cardiovascular benefits.

And the fun. But don’t forget the alcohol. My grandma’s universal cure showed a deeper understanding of the human body than all of modern medicine: If I even thought about looking pale, she would forcefeed me delicious desserts, baba au rum, black forest cake, rinced down with a warm grog.

https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2156

Overweight and obesity is associated with increased risk of all cause mortality and the nadir of the curve was observed at BMI 23-24 among never smokers, 22-23 among healthy never smokers, and 20-22 with longer durations of follow-up. The increased risk of mortality observed in underweight people could at least partly be caused by residual confounding from prediagnostic disease. Lack of exclusion of ever smokers, people with prevalent and preclinical disease, and early follow-up could bias the results towards a more U shaped association.

https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3324

Indices of central fatness including waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, waist-to-height ratio, waist-to-thigh ratio, body adiposity index, and A body shape index, independent of overall adiposity, were positively and significantly associated with a higher all cause mortality risk. Larger hip circumference and thigh circumference were associated with a lower risk. The results suggest that measures of central adiposity could be used with body mass index as a supplementary approach to determine the risk of premature death.

https://europepmc.org/article/pmc/4855514

Relative to normal weight, both obesity (all grades) and grades 2 and 3 obesity were associated with significantly higher all-cause mortality. Grade 1 obesity overall was not associated with higher mortality, and overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality. The use of predefined standard BMI groupings can facilitate between-study comparisons.

TLDR: Being overweight and grade 1 obese are not that bad for you, and being slightly overweight can tentatively be considered beneficial. Confounders abound, beyond my ability to unconfound. But being fat fat? Bad idea.

My grandma’s universal cure showed a deeper understanding of the human body than all of modern medicine: If I even thought about looking pale, she would forcefeed me delicious desserts, baba au rum, black forest cake, rinced down with a warm grog.

My grandfather calls me anemic every time he sees me, and to be fair, last time I passed out and hit my head, the VBG showed I was 0.3 g% below the cutoff. Though his solution was iron tablets. And he's a doctor too.

https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2156

Imo they're trying to get it as low as possible, just mining for the right combination of factors:

In the analysis of all participants the lowest mortality was observed in those with a BMI of around 25. In subgroup analyses, however, the lowest mortality was observed in the BMI range of 23-24 among never smokers, 22-23 among healthy never smokers, and 20-22 among studies of never smokers with longer durations of follow-up (≥20 and ≥25 years).

On the curves, the mortality at 30 BMI is roughly the same as 20, and 18 is way worse than 32, so I strongly suspect aesthetic (and perhaps ascetic) considerations tainted the definition of the seemingly ‘healthy range’ of 18-25.