http://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/the-incredible-lightness-of-being-wrong/ Making sense of science Mon, 13 May 2013 10:03:39 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/the-incredible-lightness-of-being-wrong/#comment-3318 Thu, 19 Jul 2012 19:49:56 +0000 http://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/?p=3352#comment-3318 Interesting – I missed the original post but had a look at it now. Correlation/causation confusion perhaps? BMI could reflect all sorts of physiological and psychological conditions that affect mortality more than BMI itself. One very obvious example is alcoholism – alcoholics are seldom fat in my experience but it’s not a healthy lifestyle.

]]> http://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/the-incredible-lightness-of-being-wrong/#comment-3309 Thu, 19 Jul 2012 09:00:12 +0000 http://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/?p=3352#comment-3309 There is an even more worrying hypothesis as to why they changed it. It might be because they feared they were causing their readers ‘distress’. It’s one thing to correct yourself if you’re wrong, quite another to censor yourself in case someone gets upset by the truth. Like you I have a vested interest in the truth of this. I’ve lost over 7kg in 2 months, successfully hitting BMI of 25, and while I care more about not carrying a bowling ball’s mass of fat around with me than the marginal effect it might have on my mortality, it would be nice to clarify whether I’m likely to live longer or not as a result of this effort!

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