Michael Fumento: Fat Chance

"To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals." So observed Benjamin Franklin centuries ago. But Franklin didn't comment on whether food intake restriction worked by keeping people thin or by making them thin. Indeed, it's become a mantra of the "size acceptance" groups that there's no scientific evidence that losing weight increases longevity. And it's been true -- until now.

Sure, a mass of published studies show that thinner is better in terms of overall health and longevity. This is notwithstanding the occasional report like Katherine Flegal's in 2005 that encouraged the Center for Consumer Freedom, the notorious food and beverage industry front group, to practically gloat itself to death with an obese $600,000 newspaper advertising blitz. Inevitably these studies fail to account for thinness from smoking or a wasting disease, are then corrected and, like Flegal's, refuted.

Likewise, the science is overwhelming that losing weight improves markers for premature death such as vascular inflammation (which causes heart disease and stroke) and insulin resistance (which causes type 2 diabetes). But finally we have randomized, controlled studies showing a direct cause-and-effect relationship between eating less and living longer. Great news? Not, as we shall see, for the "fatophiles."

Obese persons who undergo bariatric surgery (either reducing the size of the stomach or bypassing it altogether) are far less likely to die early from diseases as disparate as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes than matched persons who didn't have the surgery, according to two studies in the August 23 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The first study, by Lars Sjostrom of Goteborg University in Sweden and colleagues, followed 2,010...

Big Fat Man on an ATV
Walkin’ Jim Stoltz

I’m a man of the earth and it ain’t no jive
I was walkin’ in the woods, before I was five
I’m a man of the mountains and I like it wild
But them noisy machines just kind of rile this child

Now just the other day I was up in the hills
Singing to the coyotes and the whippoorwills
When off in the distance I could hear a roar,
My heart starts screaming what the hells this for,
Cause all the critters were runnin’, in panic they flee
That bat out of hell comin’ through the trees,
Me, oh my, what could it be.
It was a big fat man on an ATV!
That bat out of hell comin’ through the trees,
Me, oh my, what could it be.
It was a big fat man on an ATV!

I’ve been around and I’ve seen some sights
But the one comin’ at me filled my head with fright
Chartreuse trousers and pink golf shoes,
And revving’ his engine like them bikers do

From his mouth there hung a cigar,
His belly was a-hangin’ on his handlebars
Each bump he hit it was quite a show,
Cause he’d shake and he’d shimmy like a bowl of jello!

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