Funmurphys: the Blog

Diabetes, Not Obesity Kills

I count this as good news/bad news - obesity by itself carries no extra risk of early death, but diabetes sure is a killer. Since obesity is a significant risk factor in diabetes, and being overweight is no picnic, don't start ignoring your size. And in light of the last post about how scaring people into action is ineffective, this quote makes double sense:

"Telling an overweight person that they either need to lose weight or they will die is the wrong message," he says. "There is increasing evidence that aggressively treating diabetes and other risk factors that go along with obesity, like cholesterol and high blood pressure, is even more important than losing weight."

But JoAnn Manson, M.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, doesn't buy the idea that diabetes alone is responsible for the increased risk of early death in people who are obese. Manson led the team which reanalyzed the CDC data. She tells WebMD that there is plenty of good evidence implicating obesity in death from cardiovascular disease and several types of cancer, as well as diabetes.

"There are clearly pathways through which obesity increases the risk of death that do not involve type 2 diabetes," she says.