Are "risk factors" really risky?

[jenk]

JunkFoodScience looked at risk factors recently. It starts with the following questions:

Why do studies continue to find that health risk factors don’t actually predict who will succumb to disease or die early? Why do people with a wide range of numbers (body mass index, blood lipids, blood sugars, blood pressures), diets and lifestyles end up dying around the same time and of the same things? Why don’t risk factors make a bigger, sure-fire difference?

The answer is in the definition of "risk factor". Quote: "All that the term "risk factor" means is that a researcher has found a correlation between two variables."

And what do we know about correlations?

Correlations are not causation. Correlations often contradict each other, and make for downright silly conclusions or advice. Remember this one? — “Women, rack up those frequent flyer miles to lower your risk for miscarriage!”

Seriously - women with lower frequent flyer miles have a higher rate of miscarriage.

Being Black is a risk factor for sickle cell anemia but skin whitening won’t do a thing to prevent or cure sickle cell anemia. And “being male is now the single largest demographic risk factor for early mortality in developed countries,” according to Daniel Kruger, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.
[...]
Even the term “disease” increasingly doesn’t refer to actual clinical illness or disability anymore. Some want us to believe that certain risk factors themselves are diseases, too. [Although this is inconsistently applied, depending on whatever is popular to believe or is being sold. While, for instance, the most “morbidly obese” women (the upper 0.2% of the population, even) live longer than normal weight men, obesity is declared a disease, but maleness isn’t!]

As Sandy concludes:

Remember whenever you hear the term, risk factor, that it is just a correlation, not a disease, a measure of actual risk, or cause of death.

The biggest risk factor for the diseases that eventually kill all of us is aging. And there’s not much we can do about that one, no matter how much some may want us to believe otherwise. Everything else pales by comparison. In the meantime, less panic and fear, and a lot more balance and common sense, can help all of us get the most out of the lives we have.