Pass the Eclairs, Please

New weight charts are lenient -- too much so, say some doctors

Dieters ate their desserts with a little less guilt last week. Thanks to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., women who are 5 ft. 2 in. and tip the scales at 140 could consider their weights to be right on target, as could 180-lb. men who measure 5 ft. 10 in. For the first time since 1959, the giant insurance company revised its widely used height-weight guidelines, moving them upward by as much as ten to 15 lbs. in the case of short men and women. The news brought sighs of relief from gourmands but cries of alarm from some doctors, who fear that overweight Americans will worry less about trimming down.

The charts are based on data from 4.2 million people who were tracked by 25 insurance companies for more than two decades. Statisticians correlated weight to longevity, taking into account body frame size. (This is determined by bending an arm at a right angle and measuring the distance between the two bones protruding on either side of the elbow; a 5-ft. 10-in. man with a 2 3/4-to 3-in. span is considered to have a medium frame.) The results of the study, says Dr. Paul Entmacher, chief medical director for the company, show "weights at which people live the longest. Only in that sense are they ideal or desirable."

Yet a number of medical authorities feel that the new figures are in no way desirable. The American Heart Association last week issued a statement urging people to stick with the more rigorous 1959 guidelines. "The more you weigh, the more heart attack, heart failure and even stroke in some groups," said Dr. William Castelli, medical director of the well-known major study of heart disease under way in Framingham, Mass. "The fact that fatter people are living longer may merely reflect the growing success of medical intervention in weight-related ailments," said Dr. Virgil Brown, chairman of the A.H.A. nutrition committee.

Several doctors point out that the weight charts are skewed by one key factor: smoking. As a group, smokers weigh less than average and die at an earlier age. Including them in the study thus tended to push the optimal weights higher. When the Framingham group examined the longevity of thin men who do not smoke, says Castelli, it found "the lowest overall death rate and the best health experiences" of any population.

For its part, Metropolitan does not believe that people who adopt the new guidelines will die younger. And some doctors see a bright side to the standards. "Fighting Mother Nature is getting to be a serious problem," says Dr. George Blackburn, a renowned nutrition expert at Harvard. "I have a hospital full of anorectics." He advises people who are only a few pounds away from their goals to "relax, adjust to the new range and start having fun. There's no reason to be a size 6 or 8 when a size 10, or even 12 if you're big boned, is healthy." This advice does not go, however, for the large number of Americans who are pushing size 16 for women or 44 short for men. Nearly 50% of the U.S. population weigh more than the figures in the new table, says Metropolitan's Entmacher. "We're still telling them to lose weight." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.