Dan's Papers - November 23, 2007

Just before the start of our annual Dan's Papers Potatohampton Minithon every Memorial Day, we have a sort of bazaar of offerings out in the field of the Bridgehampton Militia Park where the race begins on Ocean Road here in Bridgehampton. There are health water purveyors, masseuses, yoga instructors, energy bar purveyors and, for a few years, a health truck that offered blood pressure and fat checks.

The fat check consists of this little device that gently pinches the fat on your waist. And it's with the results of this pinch that they determine if you are too thin or too fat.

Indeed, they break it down further than that. You get a fat number. If the number is less than 18.5 you are rated THIN. If it is between 19 and 24 you are rated NORMAL. If it is between 25 and 30 you are rated OVERWEIGHT. And if it is over 31 you are rated OBESE.

I haven't seen them in the last two years, and I'm thinking that maybe it is because so many of us have become obese from eating all the burgers and fries every day, but on the other hand, there was a study made public in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association that says the people who come up as OVERWEIGHT are the healthiest and have the longest lifespan.

I mention all this because of the fact that they used the exact same number scale as used by the fat meter people at the Potatohampton, and because using that scale I have come in at OVERWEIGHT. And it used to bother me.

Now I am chuckling happily about being OVERWEIGHT.

The study followed 500 people over a ten-year period, periodically measuring their fat content and seeing what diseases they died of and for how long they lived, and they came to this startling conclusion.

The study was headlined CAUSES OF DEATH ARE LINKED TO A PERSON'S WEIGHT in the New York Times.

Yes indeed, and the winner should be chubby little me, apparently, who last measured out at 26.5.

The study did show a variation in some things. Thin people died more of heart disease, emphysema and other lung diseases. The obese died more from heart attacks, cancer, diabetes and liver disease. But then the thin did too. You have noticed that I have left both normal and overweight out of this equation.

And here the scales were tipped, get this, by the preponderance of normal people to get killed while doing things that put them in danger. Climbing mountains, racing cars, getting hit hard playing football, hang gliding. Meanwhile, us overweight people sat back and watched. We were a bit too ponderous to move about with that sort of adventurousness.

Now you can make a case that we overweight folks might miss out on a few things. But I have to tell you we make up for it by sitting around and not getting ourselves all worked up as these normal people do.

But hey, let's not fight about it. I'm only telling you what I read in the newspaper. We can all get along. Easy there, big fella.

On another matter entirely, and this sure is another matter entirely, there was a study that just came out yesterday that said that women who have bigger hips in proportion to their waists have babies with higher IQs. It's something about the fat in their rumps that feeds the babies a little extra boost while they are in the oven.