Obesity Turkey

By Steven Milloy
November 26, 2004, FoxNews.com

I want to start this week with a bit of you-heard-it-here-first news that may help you enjoy more of your holiday meals.

Last March, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief Julie Gerberding announced that obesity caused 400,000 deaths annually in the U.S., a figure approaching the annual death toll for smoking. At the time, I criticized the statistic as “the kind you make up” rather than “the kind you look up.”

Then in September, I reported that researchers from the U.S. National Center of Health Statistics said that “many methodological and conceptual difficulties arise in attempting to estimate the number of deaths in the United States that are attributable to obesity” and that the CDC’s obesity casualty count may be overstated by as much as 200 percent.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the CDC plans to revise its obesity death toll downward, reportedly by about 80,000 fatalities — a good start, but an estimate that, in my opinion, remains way too high. CDC chief Gerberding acknowledged to the Journal that “there had been human errors in the [CDC’s] calculations.”

But instead of Gerberding blaming individual scientists for their “human errors,” it appears that the problem is more institutional in nature. As it turns out, “even before the disputed study was published, several scientists at the CDC expressed misgivings to their superiors about its methodology and findings…The dissenting scientists complained that their concerns were ignored and that the agency's rigorous standards governing scientific research hadn't been followed,” reported the Journal.

Though caught in an embarrassing situation, the CDC is hardly giving up. The agency has asked the National Academy of Sciences to consider the issue, knowing full well that an NAS panel with a pre-determined and CDC-friendly viewpoint can easily be assembled.

We’ll see what happens, but in the meantime, you can worry a little less about having that extra slice of pumpkin pie.

Steven Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of "Junk Science Judo: Self-Defense Against Health Scares and Scams" (Cato Institute, 2001).