[net.med] obesity a health risk?

moiram@tektronix.UUCP (Moira Mallison ) (09/05/85)

In _The Death of Dieting_ (American Health, January/February '85), Paul 
Ernsberger, PhD (a post-doc fellow at Cornell) states:

	In my lab at Northwestern University, we have found in
	animal tests that the feast-fast cycle [analogous to
	"yo-yo" dieting] itself can cause a distinct form of
	high blood pressure.  This "dieter's hypertension" 
	develops over the course of sizable lose-gain swings
	and eventually becomes set.  In humans, this may lead 
	to congestive heart failure, rather than the heart
	attacks and kidney disease common to other forms of
	hypertension.  Doctors know overweight people are
	twice as likely to have hypertension as lean folks,
	but they have always thought the problem was the 
	extra weight.  

	My colleagues and I have evidence that the cause
	is not in in the poundage but in the dieting 
	pattern.  

Makes me wonder how many other health risks attributed to overweight
are really caused by on-again, off-again weight patterns.

Moira Mallison
tektronix!moiram