http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704762904575025313433081780.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read
The good in this article starts with stating that being slender does not mean one is healthy. Eating poor quality, or too much, food is a recipe for poor health regardless of your waist size. This is a nice bit of writing, and useful info to boot: "The findings of the Mayo study, which was published in November in the European Heart Journal, suggest that reducing heart risk requires increasing the percentage of lean muscle mass at the expense of body fat. That underscores the importance of exercise in maintaining cardiovascular health-including weight lifting and other resistance training, which helps build lean body mass. Eating a healthy diet is important in reducing body fat, too, but Dr. Lopez-Jimenez observes that if you only restrict calories, you risk losing an equal amount of body fat and lean muscle tissue and thus you could end up weighing less without significantly reducing the percentage of body fat."
Here's another bit of really good info: "But Dr. Eckel and other medical experts caution that the findings need to be validated with additional research. Big epidemiological studies such as the Mayo report are useful for spotting important trends and raising hypotheses for further inquiry. But they are not necessarily reliable for prescribing specific remedies for individual patients." This quote should be in every article about observational studies. It would help many folk sort through the confusion of conflicting conclusions that are inevitable with so many published reports about observational studies.
Summary of the good: exercise is important for health and fitness, and specific types are more important than others. I also like the fact that they say, even if they don't say it clearly enough, that caloric restriction (aka starvation diets) are not the best means to healthy weight loss, as they cost you lean mass in the short term (and in the long term, lead to weight gain, usually with increased body fat).
The bad in this study is it still refers to BMI as a meaningful measure of individual health. Any individual with a rigorious strength program and a moderate body fat level will exceed the BMI standards BECAUSE they are healthy! This number may hold significance for a population, but is beyond stupid to use as a measure of individual health. At least the writer documents this fact: "A BMI of 30 or higher indicates obesity, while people in the range from 25 to 29.9 are considered overweight. The overweight category in particular has generated controversy because many people who exercise regularly and are considered fit have BMIs above 25." So why didn't the WSJ stop there before printing this bit of tripe: "BMI, or body mass index, is a key indicator of healthy weight."
The ugly is that they missed the key conclusion, there for the taking, for anyone with knowledge of these topics: The real cue that one is ill and at greater risk for contracting the diseases of civilization is HAVING metabolic syndrome. Excess body fat is a symptom of eating poor quality food, and indicates you may soon have metabolic syndrome, but isn't the key variable. "High body fat among normal-weight men and women was associated with a nearly four-fold increase in the risk for metabolic syndrome-a cluster of abnormalities including elevated blood sugar and blood pressure. This syndrome is common among people who are obese and is an increasingly important precursor to diabetes and cardiovascular disease." That language is far too general.
To boil it all down - if you restrict carbohydrate intake and control metabolic syndrome, your health improves as do the markers of good health. If you eat too much carbohydrate but lose weight by compulsive exercise or chronic calorie restriction (great example of this in Taubes' "Good Calories Bad Calories" discussion of the treatment of President Eisenhower); or reduce your blood pressure with meds; or reduce your LDLs with statins; you are still sick - and are just masking symptoms with medicine. Better to use meds if you need them, but in my logic, I will never 'need' meds until after I've pursued remedy via a restricted carbohydrate (50-100 grams per day) dietary alternative.
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