Morgan Spurlock Watch

400,000

Spurlock writes:

Fat is deadly. Obesity-related illnesses will kill around 400,000 Americans this year--almost the same as smoking. (p. 13)

Spurlock comes back to the "400,000" figure, and the "second leading cause of death" idea several times in the book. Both are wrong.

Last April, the CDC released a report confirming what critics of the obesity hysteria have been saying for some time -- that 400,000 figure (revised from a similar 300,000 figure a decade ago) is a gross overestimation. The real number is closer to 100,000. And if you add in the lives saved by the protective effects of mild overweight, the number is closer to 25,000. Meaning that:

(A) The number Spurlock quotes here is off by a factor of fifteen.

(B) Those statistics about how many Americans are "overweight" by government standards don't mean a damned thing. Overweight is actually healthier than what the government says is the "ideal" weight. And overweight is much healthier than what the government calls "underweight."

Predictably, bureaucratic politics and turf wars are now at play. The CDC has been slow to embrace the new study, despite the fact that the agency commissioned it. The reason? The CDC's director was a co-author of the old study. There's some evidence now that the old study's flaws were known before it was ever released, but power politics trumped objections raised by other researchers during the peer-review process.

The New York Times, Forbes, Batimore Sun, USA Today, Rocky Mountain News, and Des Moines Register, among others, all slammed the CDC for letting politics trump good science. Several editorial boards and pundits (including yours truly) called on CDC director Julie Gerberding to resign.

In any case, these developments are a fine example of why it isn't wise to take every health scare pushed by the government at face value. When a study comes out that was funded by Philip Morris, people tend to read it with a good deal of skepticism. Perhaps that's appropriate. But perhaps it's time we looked at government studies the same way. They're plagued by the same biases, motivations, and slants that plague any privately-funded health research.

The new study came out about a month before Spurlock's book was published. So perhaps we should cut him some slack. My guess is that the book was already in printing when the new study came out. I'll look for a correction in the paperback edition.

On the other hand, it wasn't hard to find critics of the 400,000 study. if Spurlock had been the slightest bit curious about opposing viewpoints, he would have found enough criticism of the 400,000 number to at least have acknowledged in his book that the number isn't without its detractors. In fact, the CDC itself lowered figure to 365,000 early last year in response to many of those critics. That correction took place long enough ago that Spurlock has no excuse for going with the higher, 400,000 figure.

The Obesity "Crisis"

Spurlock writes:

The United States is the fattest nation on earth. Sixty-five percen of American adults are overweight; 30 percent are obese. According to the American Obesity Association, 127 million are overweight, 60 million Americans are obese and 9 million are "severely obese." In the decade between 1991 and 2001, obesity figures ballooned along with our own figures: from 12 percent of us being obese in 1991 to 21 percent in 2001. Almost double. In ten years. (p. 10)

It's important to note before debunking this that Americans have, on average, put on eight to ten extra pounds over the last 25 years. It's also important to note that in spite of that, we're healthier than we've ever been in the history of the country.

Now to the debunking. A huge part of the "ballooning" Spurlock speaks of has nothing to do with overeating. It's due to the fact that in 1998, the U.S. government redefined what it meant to be obese. The Centers for Disease Countrol lowered the bar. One magic night in 1998, then, 29 million Americans went to bed of "normal" weight, and woke up "overweight" -- without ever gaining a pound. Millions more went to bed "overweight," and woke up "obese." That's not the fault of McDonalds or Frito lay, or Baskin-Robins. It's the result of an alarmist government moving the goalposts to manufacture hysteria. My favorite quote comes from a Washington Post, written shortly after the decision...

"… 97 million adults -- nearly 55 percent of the U.S. population -- would be considered overweight, placing them at increased risk of such health problems as diabetes, elevated blood cholesterol, heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure."

Of course, none of these people's risk for these conditions increased overnight. The government merely drew a largely arbitrary line, and announced that one side of that line would now be healthy, and the other side wouldn't.

Of course, all of these statistics flow from the Body Mass Index, or BMI. BMI is by and large a completely arbitrary measure of health. It doesn't account for age, sex, gender, body type, or ethnicity. It also doesn't distinguish between fat tissue and muscle tissue (the latter is more dense). By now, you've probably heard about how big, muscle-bound athletes are classified as "obese" by the government. By BMI standards, more than half the NBA is obese or overweight. But in fact, any person who works out regularly is likely to fall into the "overweight" or "obese" categories. According to the government, for example, Johnny Depp is overweight. And Tom Cruise is obese. If your build is similar to theirs, you're probably obese or overweight, too (if you're wondering, the government considers me obsese, too -- here's a recent picture). Should give you an idea of how specious a tool the BMI really is.

Look at it this way: Muscle mass is denser than fat mass. If you've ever started a regular workout regimen after a few months of inactivity, you'll know that your weight tends to go up, not down, after the first few weeks. You're building muscle. Which means if ten people of normal build who don't exercise joined a gym, their collective BMI would go up, not down. But they'd be adding to the overweight-obesity statistics.

On it's own website, the Centers for Disease Control writes:

Two people can have the same BMI, but a different percent body fat. A bodybuilder with a large muscle mass and a low percent body fat may have the same BMI as a person who has more body fat because BMI is calculated using weight and height only.

[...]

This is a good reminder that BMI is only one piece of a person's health profile. It is important to talk with your doctor about other measures and risk factors. (e.g., waist circumference, smoking, physical activity level, and diet.)

The CDC's accompanying table shows a sketch of an obviously flabby man and obviously very fit man and admits that according to the government's method of calculating obesity, there is no difference between them. Remember, when people like S purlock say things like "127 million Americans are overweight," this is how they're arriving at those figures.

If the CDC advises against using BMI as the sole indicator of overall health on an individual level, why are we using BMI and only BMI to gauge the overall health of the nation? And why are people like Spurlock throwing these numbers around in an effort to influence public policy?

Spurlock mentions the American Obesity Association. For someone so skeptical of the motivations of corporations, I'm surprised he didn't do a bit more research on AOA.

Just last week, the Seattle Times ran a report on how and why the BMI was lowered in 1998. Guess who was behind it? the American Obesity Association. And a plethora of nutrition activists, drug companies, and professional scolds who had a stake in getting the government to call more of its citizens fat. Writes the Times:

In May 1995, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked 24 experts to write guidelines for diagnosing and treating obesity. The expert panel officially defined obesity as a BMI of 30 or higher, and overweight as a BMI above 25 and below 30. The panel, which included the pharmacologist who created the phen-fen combo, was criticized for its ties to the drug and weight-loss industries.

[...]

At the hearings, Interneuron presented data showing an obesity pandemic and said desperate measures were required to stop it from prematurely killing 300,000 Americans a year.

That controversial figure came from weight-loss experts and researchers who used epidemiological data from decades-old health studies to build the case that excess body fat was a crisis more urgent than even AIDS.

[...]

Also at the hearing was a newly formed group, the American Obesity Association, which built a case for treating obesity as a chronic disease. Funded largely by drug companies, including two involved with Redux, the association was headed by Dr. Richard Atkinson, an internist who advocated gastric bypass for severe obesity and who later founded a company to test for what he believed might be an "obesity virus."

At the hearing, the association positioned itself as a patient-advocacy organization, though it offered no patients to testify for the drug.

There is some evidence that extreme, morbid obesity is on the rise, though it still affects a realtively small percentage of the population. No one is advocating morbid obesity, here. But the idea that we as a nation putting on pounds, and spiraling toward a health care catastrophe just isn't supported by the facts. And when you read somewhere where it seems to be, odds are, the facts you're reading were manufactured and pushed by agents with a financial stake in promoting the hype, agents like the American Obesity Association. Even the Center for Science in the Public Interest, whom Spurlock consults thoughout the book and which is always eager to hype the obesity "threat," doubts the integrity of AOA. Center for Consumer Freedom (disclosure: a food industry-funded group) sheds light on AOA here.

NOTE: A commenter points out that my link to Tom Cruise pointed to a lookalike photo. Here's a picture of Tom Cruise. Not that it does much to undermine the point.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Mad Damned Lies

While again attacking the cattle industry, specifically its use of Bovine Growth Hormone [BGH], Spurlock writes:

It's because of the BGH that countries in the European Union won't let us export beef to them anymore; BGH is linked to mad-cow disease. (p. 102)

Short passage. Two huge errors.

First, nearly all the BGH used in the United States is synthetic. It never came from an actual cow. Which means it can't carry the misshapen protein (called a prion) that carries mad cow disease. That's only found in the nervous system of ruminants -- actual cows and sheep.

The only link between BGH and mad cow I could find anywhere was this one, in which a a consumer advocate theorized that cows on BGH grow quickly, and therefore need feed that's denser in energy and protein. This, the author concluded, means BGH cattle are more likely to get food that's made up of other ruminants, which puts that cattle at increased risk of mad cow.

Of course, even before 1997, that risk was still damn-near zero. And the whole point was rendered moot after 1997, when the FDA banned feed with ruminant remains for other ruminants.

Second, Spurlock himself goes on to write the following:

Originally discovered in the UK in 1986, the first case of mad cow in the United States wasn't documented until 2004 (in a cow raised in Canada and slaughtered in Washington state).

[...]

By the end of 2003, 143 official cases [of the human form of mad cow] had been counted in the UK, six in France, one each in Canada, Ireland, and Italy, and two in the United States--most recently, a Florida woman died of it in 2004, apparently after having eaten bad beef in the UK. (p. 102)

So to sum, Spurlock...

A) Questions the business practices of the U.S. beef industry,

B) does so by drawing a false link between bovine growth hormone and mad cow disease,

C) backs up his point by noting that Europe refuses to import U.S. beef, even though....

D) 153 of the 154 (99.3%) documented cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human form of mad cow) occured outside the United States, and 152 of the 154 occured in Europe.

A realist might also point out that these cases all occured over a period of time in which billions of pounds of beef were eaten the world over. Which means your risk of contracting the human form of mad cow from eating beef is virtually nil. And if you should contract it, there's a 99% chance didn't get the beef that gave it to you in the United States.

Somehow, Spurlock reaches into that bag of statistics and pulls out an indictment of U.S. beef.

Splenda

Spurlock writes:

“…sucralose [marketed as Splenda] has been linked in animal studies to shrinkage of the thymus glands and enlargement of the liver and kidneys. But as with NutraSweet, Splenda made it to the market before any large-scale, long-term population studies could prove or disprove those results.” (p. 98)

Sucralose was invented in 1976. It underwent more than 20 years of testing before getting FDA approval as Splenda in 1998. The "animal studies" Spurlock mentions involve animals fed enormous amounts of the stuff, amounts no sane person would approach in the course of a regular diet. That's why the FDA reviewed the studies Spurlock mentioned, and found no reason to keep the drug from the market. Here's what the FDA said upon approving the sweetener:

In determining the safety of sucralose, FDA reviewed data from more than 110 studies in humans and animals. Many of the studies were designed to identify possible toxic effects including carcinogenic, reproductive and neurological effects. No such effects were found, and FDA's approval is based on its finding that sucralose is safe for human consumption.

Splenda's been on the market in Canada for 14 years now, with no ill health effects.