[ RadSafe ] risk from being overweight

[HOWARD.LONG at comcast.net]

"We would just rationalize more!", reponded an obese genius, 

to suggestion by a physicist that more brain capacity would enable miracles, 

in a my self-help group for obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and smoking 

(the "Healthy Measures" Safeway rewards ~$800/yr, ~$1,500/family, less premium - 

 result unchanged health indsurance premiums while others rose 38% in the past 4 years). 



Howard Long, family doctor 




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bernard L. Cohen" <blc+ at pitt.edu> 
To: "Kai Kaletsch" <eic at shaw.ca> 
Cc: radsafe at radlab.nl 
Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 8:40:17 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific 
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] risk from being overweight 

The info from the Life Insurance industry is given in my paper 

C    Catalog of Risks Extended and Updated, Health Phys. 61, 317- 
335;1991       

      (posted unabridged as item #4 on my web site www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc) 
    It gives the loss of life expectancy for people more than 15% 
overweight as about 
    30 days for each pound overweight       



Kai Kaletsch wrote: 
> Friends, 
> 
> In the olden days, we used to compare the risk from 1 mSv to the 
> hypothetical risk of some other activity, like drinking a glass of 
> wine. Since then, the HPS has (rightly) discouraged the practice of 
> calculating risks from trivially small exposures. Now, I use a slide 
> comparing the life expectancy reduction of different (real) risk 
> factors and calculate the amount of radiation exposure one would need 
> to get the same reduction in life expectancy. The results are, of 
> course, non-trivial exposures and I am not violating the HPS position 
> statement. 
> 
> One line of the slide states that being 15% overweight will reduce 
> your life expectancy by about 2 years (can't remember off-hand where I 
> got this value) and that you would need to get 150 mSv/year every year 
> to get the same reduction. 
> 
> I would appreciate if someone could comment on the loss of life 
> expectancy from being overweight. Specifically with regard to this 
> article: 
> http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE55N0C720090624 . 
> It claims that overweight people live the longest. Obese and normal 
> weight people come in second, extremely obese people came in third, 
> while underweight people died youngest. To me, this was somewhat 
> surprising. 
> 
> Thanks, 
> Kai 
> 
> Kai Kaletsch 
> Environmental Instruments Canada Inc. 
> #202 135 Robin Cr. 
> Saskatoon, Saskatchewan 
> Canada S7L 6M3 
> Tel: 406 686 0081 
> Home: 306 477 0623 
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-- 
Bernard L. Cohen 
Physics Dept., University of Pittsburgh 
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 
Tel: (412)624-9245  Fax: (412)624-9163 
e-mail: blc at pitt.edu  web site: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc 


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