I'm listening to what you are saying. I don't completely agree, but I wanted to say I'm hearing your voice.
I think the of the 'overweight lives longer than underweight' study you're thinking of is the Harvard Alumni study, and if you want to read it I think I can find you a copy. It's everything that is problematic about epidemiology, in a nutshell, especially the part where they try to find out why their data doesn't say what they think it says. (When you come right down to it, the idea that men who are more than 11 lbs lighter in later life than they were when they graduated college may have a life-threatening condition seems a little obvious, doesn't it?) Medical epidemiology seems to suffer from the correlation equals causation fallacy in many, many cases, not just weight.
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I think the of the 'overweight lives longer than underweight' study you're thinking of is the Harvard Alumni study, and if you want to read it I think I can find you a copy. It's everything that is problematic about epidemiology, in a nutshell, especially the part where they try to find out why their data doesn't say what they think it says. (When you come right down to it, the idea that men who are more than 11 lbs lighter in later life than they were when they graduated college may have a life-threatening condition seems a little obvious, doesn't it?) Medical epidemiology seems to suffer from the correlation equals causation fallacy in many, many cases, not just weight.