On Thu, 5 Jun 2008, Michael Coslo wrote:

Jiggly wrote:
The hobby has lots of people who are morbidly obese.
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morbid_obesity for definition)

Sadly, many of them die from weight-related causes. We lose a lot of
nice people and good operators that way.

That reminds me.....


For years we've been force fed about how we have to eat right, not smoke,
etc. How the obese ans smokers and heavy drinkers were going to be a
healthcare disaster.

Apparently that stuff takes an average of 4 years off our life. People who
live the proper life will live around 4 years longer on average.

But the kicker is this:

When they got the stats on relative life expectancy, they found the causes of
death. Those obese and smoking and hard drinkin' jerks tended to have a quick
end, while the righteous proper folk tended to have long debilitating ends.

My Mother-in-law didn't smoke, didn't drink, and spent the lat 8 years of her
life as an dementia patient in a nursing home. I cringe every time I think of
that happening to me.

The problem with lengthening our lives is that any gains we make are at the
wrong end.

- 73 de Mike N3LI -


Some thoughts on the wisdom above: all those articles citing studies
involving statistics benefit not you, but i) the newspaper reporter making
his wages for doing this, ii) the medical school professor getting the
grants to do the work (including pay his/her salary [i.e. the school gets
its staff for free]), and iii) the bean-counter actuaries who work with
the insurance companies figuring out what premiums to charge you based on
any factors that significantly affect the mortality curves.

No doctor can plug into you any "voltmeter" (or cholesterol meter, or
weight meter, etc), and tell you because of X, YOU're going to live N more
days. You can calculate satellite orbits, miles of gas left in your car's
gas tank, and minutes of light left in a flashlight with considerable
accuracy, but in a biological animal, you can't make those kinds of
predictions unless you're talking about death being caused by bleeding at
high rates or you're in the middle of suffering a hearth attack or the
likes of that.

Now, enjoy the rest of your life as best you can (ice cream, booze, don't
smoke tobacco around me, etc) and consider that if you agonize too much
over things, then those visits to the psychiatrists will cut into your
entertainment budget AND you will be more unhappy.

73