Understanding the Obesity Paradox: Why being overweight may be less concerning than being unfit

It’s one of the paradoxes of the health community: slightly overweight people can be healthier than those with trim bodies. And being skinny can be just as dangerous, or worse, than being fat.
How could that be?
Harvard Medical School estimates that more than 300 million people worldwide are obese (defined as having a . And this matters because being obese presents a risk to your health and ultimately, 
Except it’s not as simple as that. Take, for example, a study by the Cooper Institute, a nonprofit organization in Dallas, that looked at body composition and fitness levels in 22,000 men, ages 30 to 83. Over the course of the eight study years, 428 participants died. What’s interesting is that those who were overweight and fit were two times less likely to have died than those who were lean and fit. There was also no significant difference in the overall death rates (the all-cause mortality) between the overweight fit men and the lean fit men.
So perhaps the pursuit of health should be directed away from a singular focus on body composition toward
Mortality is a U-shaped curve
What came out of reports a few years ago was something called the obesity paradox or sometimes reverse epidemiology. What the data show are that those who are either at the low side of the weight curve or the very high side are at increased risk of death. Those who are slightly overweight have a 6 percent of death than their ‘normal’ weight peers. These factors were shown to be particularly important in certain groups of people, such as very elderly individuals or those with certain chronic diseases. It further postulates that normal to low body mass index or normal values of cholesterol may be detrimental and associated with higher mortality in asymptomatic people.



 

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