Being overweight overtakes tobacco smoking as the leading disease risk factor

This paper provides a helpful breakdown of types of mortalities and how they&#x27;re associated with BMI. It&#x27;s interesting to see that the lowest All-cause mortality is at a BMI of 25. A BMI of 30 doesn&#x27;t increase the hazard ratio that much, but a BMI of ~45 doubles it. The minimum for cancer mortality is notably lower (21) but perhaps surprisingly the minimum communicable disease mortality is at a BMI of 26.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thelancet.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;landia&#x2F;article&#x2F;PIIS2213-8587(18)30288-2&#x2F;fulltext" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thelancet.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;landia&#x2F;article&#x2F;PIIS2213-8...</a>

&gt; Overweight, including obesity, overtook tobacco use as the leading risk factor in 2024, driven by a substantial fall (41%) in the burden attributable to tobacco use since 2003.<p>According to the study, it&#x27;s not so much that more people got fat, it&#x27;s that fewer people are smoking. A lot of comments here missed this I think.

I wonder if we&#x27;ll ever get to a place where we hold food companies accountable for addictive, unheathy food being advertised and sold the way we hold tobacco companies accountable?<p>I know there is a personal responsibility involved in both, but the situation seems similar.

Well, this is excellent news. I can start smoking again!

It is <i>much</i> harder to treat a food addiction than a smoking one.<p>The usual way to do that is to stop smoking entirely and eventually forget about it. You cannot stop eating. Food tastes good. We have infinite food available. The hell are we supposed to do about it?

There is no doubt in my mind that the alcohol consumption is much more of a contributing factor to not only the obesity but also the overall decline in health wellbeing and raise in suicide&#x2F;depression. Alcohol is socially accepted poison, and I feel its consumption in any amount is significantly worse for the individual than any poor diet&#x2F;exercise regiment.

I saw a news article the other day that the obesity rate decreased instead of increased last year for the first time in well over a decade.<p>I wonder how much GLP-1s have to do with all of that, and how much more they&#x27;ll do.

We&#x27;re probably less than 3 years away from health insurers making GLP-1s free as a cost-saving measure.

It appears that sentiments that downplay or dispute the health risks are growing in large social media bubbles, with strong effects on the real world. Efforts to push back on serving unhealthy food are undermined, doctors discouraged from discussing weight with their patients as a personal and sensitive issue; overweight models validate unhealthy body compositions. This surely has to please the food industry, which is as culpable as the tobacco industry in harming peoples health.<p>I would propose a concerted effort through mandatory levels of food quality that is served to the public (e.g. schools, hospitals), funded by a higher tax on sugary atrocities, limits on sale of sugary food and drinks to children, and an outright ban on any substance designed to create cravings.

One of the most effective diets I&#x27;m aware of is the coffee and cigarette diet. Anytime you feel hungry, have a coffee and a cigarette first, then eat a little if you&#x27;re still hungry.<p>It has a much better compliance rate that other calorie-restriction diets.

Nicotine helps control weight so it also makes sense that as we smoke less we&#x27;ll gain (even) more weight.

I found the ABC (oz) news reporting a bit deficient on this. Leading disease risk factor doesn&#x27;t have to mean its rising, it can be that smoking has fallen and now, people who would have died of COPD and Cancer caused by smoking die of COPD and different cancers, caused by morbid obesity.<p>Its probably just me but I found the language around absolutes and relatives a bit flakey. The overall population is rising so absolutes trend upward but leading goes to relatives, and so the rate of increase against population increase is material.

I wonder if we&#x27;ll see an increase in other nicotine related issues. It&#x27;s hearsay from my gen-Z colleagues but apparently there&#x27;s a bit of a ZYN&#x2F;snus epidemic.

Excellent. I’ve never smoked but I am obese as hell.<p>Maybe soon it will kill me and I can finally be done with this forever worsening hellscape called life.

Honestly, fasting feels great and I just need that reminder that it does.

According to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dqydj.com&#x2F;bmi-percentile-calculator-united-states&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dqydj.com&#x2F;bmi-percentile-calculator-united-states&#x2F;</a><p>67% of American adults are overweight. Only 13% of them have a BMI less than 22 (center of the healthy BMI range).<p>How does it translate to aesthetic preferences. Is someone with a BMI of 22 so far of the US norm that they would get strange looks, or would be considered unhealthy?

So, since smoking can help you lose weight...

Most insurance plans in the US don&#x27;t cover treatments, drugs, or surgeries that work for weight loss...<p>Seems like they ought to.

Can we expect those Truth commercials to start fat shamming folks since tobacco and e-cigs are no longer a problem?

Just went a month without cigarettes today, yay! Still overweight :(

We should be looking at eating poorly as well.

...in Australia might be worth adding.

Honestly I have a BMI of 23 and feel like I have a &quot;beer belly&quot;<p>If you are over 25 you just need to loose weight straight up

Sometimes I read this stuff and think I live in the most ridiculous bubble.<p>It&#x27;s bizarre to me that people don&#x27;t look after their health.<p>I wake up and I&#x27;m like, right, there are three tracks - financial (go to work, develop career, run business, do admin, whatever), physical (exercise, keep relatively fit, don&#x27;t eat 4000 cal a day unless bulking), social (don&#x27;t just sit at home all day and become a gremlin). There are others but that&#x27;s the main.<p>I don&#x27;t spend equal amounts of time on them but they&#x27;re all there.<p>It seems to me that apparently other people don&#x27;t think of it this way. They just sort of wake up and do whatever on autopilot and go to sleep and whatever happens to them happens. What&#x27;s that all about?

We need to wake up to the reality that solving the obesity crisis (if it is actually something we want to solve—enough healthy people may be happy with paying double for healthcare) may require measures perceived by modern liberals as authoritarian or cruel.<p>I think this because measures like what we did with tobacco—-public health demonization of junk foods and junk food consumption, banning advertisement of junk food, warning labels on junk food, and high excise taxes on junk food—are unlikely to ever be accepted by the healthy population that has no problem restricting its junk food intake to stay below BMI 30 (60+% of the population). They won’t want to pay double for chips just because obese people can’t stop themselves from eating two bags instead of one.<p>The only alternative is to charge the obese population on the back end—when they pay for healthcare. Obese people would be made to pay a health insurance surcharge to compensate for the additional healthcare resources they consume. This measure will be decried as “insensitive” and “cruel.”<p>Alternatively we could do both.<p>By the way—ozempic et al are unlikely to solve the crisis as some hope. Studies show average long term, sustained weight loss of 10-20 pounds. Good, but not enough to help people who are hundreds of pounds overweight—a sizable portion of the obese population that costs the healthcare system so much.

Never ending war with happy people.

People are trying to make being overweight as something acceptable instead of a condition to be treated.