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The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention apologized Thursday for confusion generated by two widely divergent studies on the dangers of obesity, saying it was unclear to what extent excess weight contributes to early death.
CDC Director Julie Gerberding, an author of one of the challenged studies, at the same time still insists that weighing even a few too many pounds is unhealthy and argues the nation's battle against the bulge should remain a top priority.
Critics called Gerberding's attempt to clarify confusion over the studies, which caused an uproar in the food and beverage industry and among scientists inside and outside the CDC, "damage control in the first order."
While the studies agreed that obesity was a major concern, they disagreed over how much it led to early death.
The first study, conducted in part by Gerberding and released last year, concluded that being overweight or obese causes 400,000 deaths a year. Gerberding and other health officials predicted then that the death toll from obesity would soon eclipse fatalities from tobacco use, estimated at 435,000 deaths a year.
Quickly confronted with questions about their methods, Gerberding and the other authors of the study issued a correction, reducing their estimate to 365,000 deaths a year. The agency blamed the mistake on a computer error.
Then in April, another obesity study, led by Katherine Flegal of the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, put the projected death toll dramatically lower at 112,000 people --- or as few as 26,000 deaths by one analysis.
Another part of Flegal's study quickly drew public attention: a finding that people who are overweight, but not obese, have a lower death rate than people of normal weight. The conclusion raised concerns among some health officials that overweight people would ignore messages to lose weight.
Flegal said the finding may have resulted from more frail and elderly people, who risk death from illness by being thin, being included in her normal weight category.
The dispute over how much obesity kills and whether having a few extra pounds is good led to charges by the Center for Consumer Freedom --- a nonprofit organization funded in part by restaurant owners --- that Americans have been "force-fed a steady diet of obesity myths by the food police."
Gerberding tried to counter such criticism Thursday, saying she was "very sorry for the confusion that these scientific discussions have had."
Claiming "this risk estimation process is in its infancy," the CDC director said obesity's link to major, costly illnesses nevertheless makes it a "serious epidemic" deserving even greater public attention.
Obesity contributes to major illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and arthritis at a cost of $75 billion a year, Gerberding said. "We need to be absolutely, explicitly clear about one thing: Obesity and overweight are critically important health threats in this country," she said.
The prevalence of obesity has doubled among adults in the past three decades and, she said, among children in the last 20 years.
Gerberding said being overweight, even if not obese, is bad. It is associated with being unfit --- and thus more prone to disease --- as well as being a precursor to becoming obese.
"A lot of people were hoping that CDC was going to come out and say it was OK to be overweight, but we're not saying that," she said. "It is not OK to be overweight."
Flegal, in an interview, said that even though her study suggested that being overweight, but not obese, could lead to a longer life, drawing such emphasis from just one study "would be too sweeping."
She said some of the confusion stems from uncertainty about which factors leading to obesity may most cause early death. "Is it obesity itself? Is it poor diet? Is it physical inactivity?" she asked.
Dan Mindus, senior analyst with the Center for Consumer Freedom, called Gerberding's shift to focusing on the cost of illnesses stemming from obesity, and not mortality, "damage control in the first order."
"Previously the CDC's 24/7 message was that your love handles are going to kill you," Mindus said. "Now that they're caught with a flawed study, they're trying to redirect the focus to other issues, such as cost and diseases."
Copyright 2005 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
