Erroneous Report Exaggerates American Obesity
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

ATLANTA – A widely reported government study that said obesity is about to overtake smoking as the no. 1 cause of death in America contained statistical errors and may have overstated the problem, health officials acknowledged yesterday.
The government is working on a rare correction to the study.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in March in a study coauthored by its director, Dr. Julie Gerberding, that a poor diet and physical inactivity were responsible for 400,000 deaths in 2000, a 33% jump from 1990.
However, the CDC admitted yesterday that it made an error in calculating how many people died from obesity in the last decade.
Although CDC officials declined to specify the corrected number of deaths, The Wall Street Journal reported that the agency may have overstated the number by 80,000, representing an increase of less than 10 percent from 1990 to 2000. The errors were first reported by the Journal yesterday.
The mistakes consisted of simple mathematical errors, such as including total deaths from the wrong year, the newspaper reported.
“I think there were some statistical miscalculations, but I also think there is a differing of opinions in regards to methodologies to make these calculations,” CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said. “This is certainly not scientific misconduct; there’s no allegation anyone had any intent to falsify data.”
Mr. Skinner said the CDC plans to submit a correction to the Journal of the American Medical Association, which published the study in March. He said the correction will explain how the error was made.