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JoAnn E. Manson, MD; Walter C. Willett, MD
Brigham and Women's Hospital Harvard School of Public Health Boston

Meir J. Stampfer, MD
Brigham and Women's Hospital Boston

Charles H. Hennekens, MD
Brigham and Women's Hospital Harvard Medical School Boston

JAMA. 1987;257(14):1896.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.—

We are grateful to Drs Beasley and Ernsberger for their comments.

Dr Beasley suggests that physical activity, social status, and diet should also be examined as confounding variables in the assessment of body weight and longevity. We did note in our report that "improved understanding of the extent to which nutrition and physical activity influence, or mediate, the relationship observed between obesity and mortality is important." We believe, however, that there is a distinction between the nature of these variables and the methodological biases that we emphasized. These variables are not clear and distinct confounders of the weightmortality relationship in the same sense as cigarette smoking. Rather, they have complex interrelationships with body weight, and the causal pathways are unclear. For example, physical inactivity is both a cause and a consequence of obesity, and part of the benefit of exercise may be to control weight. Social status is . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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