Sour Grapes

Well, the sour grapes about one little deviance from the de rigueur fat=bad folklore continues. I suspect some people put @verweight and @besity on their must view list, because it took fat haters a little while to catch onto an opportunity to vent their unhealthful spleens. 'Underweight' threw them.

All the study stumbled over, whilst reviewing GP's records was there were more diagnoses of dementia among people with the lowest weight;

Earlier this month, a major study in the Lancet seemed to suggest that obesity protects people against dementia. 

It did not "suggest" any such thing;

Our results contradict the hypothesis that obesity in middle age could increase the risk of dementia in old age. 

[My emphasis] That's pretty clear. Being fat in middle age is associated with decreased diagnosis of dementia. Anything more than that would come out of  describing how underlying metabolic function is causative of potential differences in health outcomes amongst weight classes (rather than individuals). That's beyond the scope of epidemiology.

And as we all know, correlation ibid.

I don't object to criticism of these findings, far from. It's nice to see some genuine rigour applied to weight-related epidemiology. Change 'under' for 'over' weight and you can hear missing critiques of 'obesity' hypothesizing fall like spring rain.

These findings don't alter the fact of contriving generalizing outcomes by category, partitioning these into individual units, claiming this determines health outcomes, has neither merit nor relevance.

Finding out how to alter metabolic outcomes, via tweaking metabolic function has nothing to do with using weight for the purposes of social larceny engineering.

Anyhow, back to the cause of all the sulking;

....this contradicts previous studies that show that if you are obese, you are more likely to have diabetes, high blood pressure and high levels of cholesterol, all of which contribute to the development and progression of dementia.

 Indulge my reiteration of the key flim-flam here;

Overweight and obesity in mid-life, measured by BMI, have been associated with a higher risk for late-onset dementias on the basis of epidemiological reports.

The use of "association", "risk" especially are weaselly and loose in the extreme. As is most @besity nonsense, built as it is on a stack of cards.

As one critic of this finding pointed out risk is not deterministic. The rest of that little summary goes;

Adipose tissue, the main contributor to overweight and obesity, lends biological plausibility to increased risk because it is the largest endocrine organ in the human body and because it increases vascular risk.

Ha, ha, ha, @besity wallahs are not only obsessed with food, they're fixated on fat cells as vandals. A reminder that @besity's a metaphor, with its villainous adipose cells, round, yellow with pencil moustaches to twirl the ends of as they wreak havoc on innocent organs-the ones @besity professionals haven't turned into offal. Because erm what? They just intrinsically baaad? No, that's silly. They turn baaad once your BMI passes 24.99999999999999........

Trez science.

And erm, no to this hypothesis lending "biological plausibility." Even if it did, proper standards of defining actual, rather than mythological causality, apply.

The most favoured scenario seems to be fat people die before we can get demented, of course without anything so tiresome as perusing the study. I've never heard thinnest sold so effectively;

....epidemiologist Deborah Gustafson of State University of New York has challenged this interpretation and says the study design is flawed. GPs diagnose dementia with varying degrees of accuracy, and the timeframe between the age at which the BMI was recorded and the date of onset of dementia is not clear.

 "Varying degrees of accuracy," eh? That's a euphemism and a half. As for the latter, she seems to be alluding to the possibility that what? A person could be diagnosed whilst fat and slim down under the influence? So weight isn't much use as a diagnostic tool? Even more obvious, the direct connection between spontaneous weight loss, ageing, pathology, disease and ultimately death? The one that's usually cut out of the frame?

Our cohort of 1 958 191 people from UK general practices had a median age at baseline of 55 years (IQR 45-66) and a median follow-up of 9.1 years (IQR 6.3-12.6). Dementia occurred in 45 507 people, at a rate of 2.4 cases per 1000 person-years. Compared with people of a healthy weight, underweight people (BMI - 20 kg/m²) had a 34% higher (95% CI 29-38) risk of dementia. Furthermore, the incidence of dementia continued to fall for every increasing BMI category, with very obese people (BMI 40 + kg/m²) having a 29% lower (95% CI 22-36) dementia risk than people of a healthy weight. These patterns persisted throughout two decades of follow-up, after adjustment for potential confounders and allowance for the J-shape association of BMI with mortality.

Clear enough? Or in short;

Very obese people, with a BMI over 40, were 29% less likely to get dementia 15 years later than those in the normal weight category.

I say the same thing about this that I say about other findings, find out how the body produces weight. Then in this case, find out how that over time affects the production of the brain's cells and anatomy. Indeed, the former might tell you the latter, if that is indeed relevant.

One thing I'm sure we can all sense is excessive, unyielding negative stress has its part to play in undermining mental and physical well-being, so when people try and dump all the ills of being human on you. Remember to be mindful. Step back from their thought- stream and let it flow by or through you....

Just let it go......