Don’t diet just yet
Fat Boy
by mandj98
on Flickr
What would you do with a database of the weights, measurements and life histories of fourteen thousand people? Economic historian Marco Sunder used them to relate life expectancy to Body Mass Index. He reached the surprising conclusion that slightly “overweight” people lived longer.
Nobody’s implying that healthy eating and regular exercise are bad for you. All the advice is that these are worth doing for good reasons but what Sunder found, and was borne out by subsequent medical research, was that people dieting excessively to bring their bodies into the “normal” range were decreasing their life expectancies.
This is one of many intriguing, succinct and occasionally odd economic ideas in “Economics 2.0: What the best minds in Economics can teach you about business and life,” a book released this year by economics journalists Norbert Häring and Olef Storbeck. Other topics they explore include The Economics of Beauty, Why Economists love Sports, How Bad Will the Financial Crisis Get and why Europeans were a great deal shorter in the 17th Century.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Perhaps the ‘slightly “overweight”’ should not be categorised as such…
May 4th, 2009 at 1:48 am
Shades of The Undercover Economist about this entry! Not that I’m over weight but after realizing I’m eating too much of an acid diet decided that eating more healthily is in order.
I love economics! If only I felt that way at university…
November 8th, 2011 at 3:24 am
Its surprising that the slightly overweight live longer as the media would have us believe otherwise …
October 14th, 2014 at 10:41 am
understanding Economics was a hard thing to do for me especially in high school because it had a lot of long questions and lot of graph work. so all that kinda killed the love for economics but after so many recessions and the high unemployment rate i had to start analyzing all those problems using economics concept that’s when the love of economics arose,its so surprising that basically we deal with economics everyday.
October 16th, 2014 at 7:53 am
It is a useful metaphor to use to describe economics, but if there is that much information on a good economy and they know all the factors to keep the economy “healthy”, why is there still problems? John gave a good comment where he said that the slightly overweight live longer as the media would have us believe otherwise, which reflects perfectly on the economy these days. Economics is a key subject for knowledge.