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Weighty woes
Worrying about weighing too much may be bad for you, no matter how much you actually weigh. Using results from a telephone health survey run by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers analysed data on more than 170,000 men and wom
en in the U.S. Among other information about health and lifestyle, all reported height and weight, how much they would like to weigh and how many days in the past month they had felt physically or mentally unhealthy. The study, published in The American Journal of Public Health, found that men who wanted to lose 1 per cent, 10 per cent and 20 per cent of their body weight reported 0.05, 0.9 and 2.7 unhealthy days a month, respectively. Women with the same weight-loss desires reported 0.1, 1.6 and 4.3 total unhealthy days a month. The results held even after controlling for age and body mass index. The authors acknowledge that their findings depend on self-reports, and that women tend to say they weigh less than they do, while men claim to be taller than they are. But controlling for many variables — like diabetes, hypertension and smoking — did not significantly alter the conclusions. “We need to re-engineer what public health agencies are telling people,” said Peter Muennig, the lead author and an assistant professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia. — (NYT)
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