morning surfing...

[jenk]

silenceleigh posted a pointer to an article at JunkFoodScience on how being what the CDC terms "overweight" after age 65 is healthier than being thin. From the abstract of a study published in the American Journal of Public Health:

Results. During 8 years of follow-up, there were 945 deaths. Mortality was lowest among women in the middle of the distribution of each body size measure. For BMI, the lowest mortality rates were in the range 24.6 to 29.8 kg/m2. The U-shaped relations were seen throughout the age ranges included in this study and were not attributable to smoking or measures of preexisting illness. [...]

Conclusions. Our results do not support applying the National Institutes of Health categorization of BMI from 25 to 29.9 kg/m2 as overweight in older women, because women with BMIs in this range had the lowest mortality.
(emphasis added)

The JunkFoodScience article goes into much more detail about the methodology and results, including other studies with similar results and noting that

The slightly increased risks seen among the very largest women, however, were still less than the much higher risks seen among women in the smallest quintile. The women with the highest risks were not extremely small, either, but had BMIs starting under 22.38 (about 130 pounds for a 5-4 woman).

Clicking around the JunkFoodScience site, I found other interesting pieces about fat-phobic mothers possibly stunting their children's growth by watering formula and increases in premature babies in the 1950s and now correlate with urging pregnant women not to gain "too much weight".

But what made me chuckle was this bit on nocebo - the opposite of placebo:

Have you ever taken one of those tests to see if you might have a health problem from an environmental exposure, food or toxin that your doctor hasn’t identified? Simply reading the questions, suggests to us all sorts of horrors or possible bad things we might have been exposed to or symptoms we could be experiencing!

....which put a new light on Branch's claim that she has Asperger's because "I read about it online and decided I had it" and "I checked off seven of ten boxes on the list".