Perhaps I Should Use Smaller Words
Researchers have linked obesity in men to instances of lower IQ. This affects men, not women, with a BMI of 30 or more. This has led to headlines like “Obese Men ‘Have Lower IQs’” that fail to give the full picture, thus perpetuating the “fat and stupid” sterotype.
The scientists who did the research, from the University of Boston, suggested that the unhealthy diet which led to the weight gain might be also damaging blood vessels supplying the brain. However, previous studies have suggested that people who already have a lower IQ are less likely to eat healthily, which could lead to them piling on the pounds.
The lead researcher also trots out the old “what about the children?” thing, saying, “The really frightening thing is the implication for obese children.” And there’s some more scaremongering about vascular dementia, even though there’s no science to back that up.
I don’t know; science is science, but it’s the tone of it all that’s rubbing me the wrong way. I would be interested to know what Junkfood Science and La Wade have to say about this study.
Posted by mo pie
This whole ‘obese children’ scare is ridiculous.
Children need a higher fat content in their diet,
than adults do for adequate brain development.
*sigh*
all of this is really tiring.
My M-I-L has senile dementia and it’s probably from long-term anorexia. Maybe it’s starvation that make women stupid or crazy?
BTW–
Have you seen this in The Onion?
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/study_many_americans_too_fat_to
I did read that Onion article last week (I actually read the paper version) and laughed my ass off. Then I made a mental note to post about it. Then I forgot. So… thanks!
Well, first of all, that article is really badly written! They don’t say the name of the journal in which the study was published and they get the name of the university wrong (there is no “University of Boston”). So I’m not totally sure I’m looking at the right study here, but I do see a paper that was published in April by that Elias guy (although he’s not the lead author, as they claim) that looked at hypertension and obesity as risk factors for changes in cognitive function over a 12 year period. They found that both obesity and hypertension were individually linked with a decline in cognitive function, and that obesity and hypertension together had a synergistic effect on cognitive decline. They didn’t determine what the mechanism of this synergy might be, and I don’t think this is something that’s well understood in the field, although the idea that a link exists has been shown in numerous studies and is pretty widely accepted.
I think the reason why they bring up the issue of obese children here is because it points to the potential broader social implications of the finding. There are more obese children now than ever before, so any health effects of obesity are going to have an increasing impact on our society as those children grow up. Alison is right that children need adequate fat in their diet for proper brain development, so if our society showed a trend towards historic numbers of children being undernourished, that would be a matter for concern as well.
Actually, re-reading the article, I think the paper they’re talking about is not the same as the one I summarized, because that one combined results from both men and women instead of separating them. The one they talk about in the article doesn’t seem to be on PubMed yet.
Somebody hide my SAT results! Don’t want to disturb their thesis with my high scores.
“science is science.”
Not really. Epidemiology is one of the softest of the soft sciences. It’s right up there with sociology, anthropology and psychology in “sciences” which you have to read with extreme caution.
“The scientists who did the research, from the University of Boston, suggested that the unhealthy diet which led to the weight gain might be also damaging blood vessels supplying the brain.”
Overcompensation for inferiority complex. None of the scientists who did the research got into Harvard.
/*snerk*
This reminds me of the illogical causation theories that were purported by so-called doctors during slavery and the eugenics eras. (Check out Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid for some appalling cases.)
“This reminds me of the illogical causation theories that were purported by so-called doctors during slavery and the eugenics eras.”
I know, right? CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION.
I’m sure I rant about the lack of critical thinking in our culture too much.
Naaahhh.
This article reeks of generalization. It makes me think we should start using phrenology again to make medical decisions. I find it hard to believe that this correlation between IQ and “being fat” could be proven. Maybe there are just that many people in the world with low IQs. I think seeing a chart of average IQ scores with people in the same demographic would have been helpful to substantiate the findings, no?
I agree that this article did not present a very convincing argument. But there have been dozens of studies conducted in different countries and under different conditions that have linked obesity with impaired cognition (do a google search for “vascular dementia obesity” to read some), and several potential mechanisms are now being studied. The link is not yet proven, but I also think the evidence is sufficient that this hypothesis shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
But of course all that is very different from saying that all obese people are stupid, and I agree with Mo that this headline was inflammatory. There are many risk factors for dementia, including certain genes, and I can’t imagine any newspaper running a headline saying “People with APOE-e4 gene variant have lower IQs.”
“There are many risk factors for dementia”
Many, many risk factors.
What will they come with next? The world is becoming a huge sandbox with all these wannabe bullies.
Well, does going to university make you stupider? Because it definitely makes you gain weight. My friends and I were relatively healthy up until final year, when we all sort of stopped exercising and ate a lot of cake to combat stress.
I used to have a quotation stuck to my computer which said (from memory) “Exams are passed on coffee and chocolate. It is impossible to have a finely honed mind and a finely honed body.”
Then I decided it was defeatist and chucked it out. But nonetheless, I don’t have nearly so much time to exercise since I started graduate school…
That’s not a false correlation, but the one in the article definitely IS.
“‘I agree with Mo that this headline was inflammatory. There are many risk factors for dementia, including certain genes, and I can’t imagine any newspaper running a headline saying “People with APOE-e4 gene variant have lower IQs.'”
Yes, thank you! That’s exactly what I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Also, the fact that there’s no University of Boston is pretty amusing.
Haha, well, it’s funny you should mention that Mo, because this afternoon, my dad sent me an article from today’s New York Times entitled “Study Says Eldest Children Have Higher IQs.” (He did not send it to my two sisters, who are younger). It didn’t say “Younger Children Have Lower IQs.”
And K, these studies are looking at relationships between lifetime obesity and long-term risk of poorer neurocognitive performance, not the effects of gaining a few pounds over the course of a year. Of course you’re right that education doesn’t lower IQ, and in fact it has actually been found to reduce your risk of neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer’s (although again, that is just a correlation, not an established causal relationship). But I have to disagree with your quote–exercise has been found to improve mental performance both in the short and long term. And college students who participate in varsity sports have been shown to have higher GPAs and higher rates of graduation. So it might actually be worth it, intellectually and academically, to put the studying on the back burner once in a while!
Well apparently the writer of this article isn’t too bright – there is no such place as “University of Boston” – does he mean UMass or BU?
The BBC article is dated March 3, 2003, so I think maybe the work they oversimplified was the following:
Elias MF, Elias PK, Sullivan LM, Wolf PA, D’Agostino RB. Lower cognitive function in the presence of obesity and hypertension: the Framingham heart study. Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord. 2003 Feb;27(2):260-8.
The number of male participants is incorrectly cited in the BBC article, but the overall number of participants does tot up to roughly 1400.
La Wade is, as always, on the money: there’s plenty of research supporting the notion that obesity is among the risk factors for vascular dementia, and is plausibly on a proposed (much-forked, multivariate) causative pathway. The Framingham Heart Study is a well-respected and very longstanding (fifty years and counting) cohort study run jointly by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and Boston U. In this use of the data, the investigators wanted to see whether the existing observations about obesity and neurological damage from altered cerebral blood flow and microvascular damage were, as the mechanism seems to suggest, associated with an increased risk of measurable cognitive loss among people without clinical dementia and with and without hypertension (to see where obesity and hypertension interacted.)
The “what of the children” comment, taken in the context of FHS, is probably best interpreted literally: if obesity results in increasing neurologic damage over time, with or without hypertension, then the longer that people live with obesity, the greater the deficits are likely to be, so obese children who never shed the weight are likely to be at most risk.
BTW, Harvard jealousy is unlikely given that Dr. Elias has been at University of Maine for the past 30 years (he’s a collaborator with FHS – but he runs the Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study, which is also old and well-respected and a source of a lot of our understanding of how cardiovascular disease works in the real world.) Also, Ivy League jealousy isn’t as common at the advanced-degree level of public health as it is at the general undergrad level, probably because the pissing matches are so different.