It’s been a quarter century since Ben Wattenberg wrote “The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong,” in which he argued that much of the pessimism of the day — about everything from the economy and environment to bedrock American values — was jarringly out of sync with the facts. If that book were being written today, I have no doubt that one of the chapters would dissect the fear-mongering about Americans’ expanding waistlines.
It’s not that the bad news about obesity is all wrong. Yet the health risks for a majority of officially overweight people have been hyped and stretched until they bear only a casual relationship to reality. Meanwhile, seemingly no amount of new research makes a dent on the preaching.
Just last week, another massive study, this time in Japan, found that modestly overweight people live six to seven years longer than skinny folk. “We had expected thin people would show the shortest life expectancy but didn’t expect the difference to be this large,” an associate professor at Tohoku University’s Graduate School of Medicine told a reporter.
Ah, but surely the longevity gap between skinny and normal-weight people would be even greater, right? Probably not. A major study published four years ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association discovered no increased mortality risk for people in what is usually described as the “overweight” (as opposed to “obese”) range — those with a body mass index of 25 to 29.9.
To the contrary. While the JAMA study concluded that there were 111,909 premature deaths nationally in 2000 among the truly fat, those merely in the overweight category actually seemed to have a slight advantage (86,094 prolonged lives) over Americans who weighed less.
Don’t blame yourself if you don’t recall that study — or others reaching similar conclusions. After a blip of publicity, they are usually buried amid dire warnings that any excess weight needs urgent attention.
Just to be clear: Americans have grown plumper in the past couple of decades almost across the board, meaning a greater number than ever are also seriously obese. That’s unhealthy — Type 2 diabetes, anyone? — and doubly so for those who are physically inactive.
Even so, the morbidly obese remain a minority of the overweight. Most are merely tubby — an aesthetic issue for some but hardly a red siren.
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“They could make much more money in the private sector, but they decided to forgo that for public service.” That was former Colorado Senate President Peter Groff explaining why he’d given staffers nearly $30,000 in bonuses despite the dire status of the state’s budget.
Could his staffers have made much more in the private sector? Maybe, although half of the bonuses, it should be noted, went to three employees making, respectively, $82,000, $66,000 and $44,000. Not lavish pay, by any means, but not gruel, either.
It’s possible that Groff was merely repeating the cliche about public employees being underpaid compared to the private sector. Yet if it were really true that most could make much more elsewhere, wouldn’t many make a move?
As it happens, most Americans in the private sector are as far removed from the lifestyle of a corporate CEO as their brothers and sisters in the public sector. Indeed, further removed, as USA Today reporter Dennis Cauchon explained last year.
“State and local government workers now earn an average of $39.50 per hour in total compensation, reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Private workers earn an average of $26.09 an hour,” Cauchon wrote, with most of the difference in benefits.
Maybe private-sector workers should start complaining about how much more they could have made if they’d only entered public service.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com
