The Obesity Paradox

I discovered something a week and a half ago that I had never heard before. It is called the Obesity Paradox. Basically, the Obesity Paradox is a body of evidence that most research scientists have now accepted as too overwhelming to ignore any longer.

In order to explain the Obesity Paradox I will need to give some background. In the medical literature, there are several weight categories used in medical research. These are called BMI, or Body Mass Index categories. BMI is calculated by measuring hight and weight, so it is a very arbitrary and inexact tool to measure disease risk.

However, it is used often in medical research because it is much easier to keep track of people's hight and weight than to actually measure muscle mass versus fat mass in large numbers of people.

There are several BMI categories that researchers and the medical establishment use. The lowest is underweight, with a BMI of less than 18.5. Normal wight is a BMI between 18.5-24.9. Overweight is a BMI between 25.0-29.9. Than there are the obese categories. They range between Class I to Class III Obesity. Class I is a BMI between 30.0-34.9, Class II is between 35.0-39.9, and Class III is over 40.0.

There have been medical studies during the past 12 to 15 years that started showing the paradox. One of the first scientists to discover the paradox in his research, Carl Lavie, could not get his medical study published in any journal for over a year. His study showed that being in the overweight category to mild obese category actually increased survival rates for people who have heart problems.

Than similar studies found the same result for people with a laundry list of health problems; pneumonia, burns, stroke, hypertension, and heart disease. Researchers who try to show that the data is invalid inevitably come up short. The researcher who has become a lightning rod for hostility is an epidemiologist at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention named Katherine Flegal.

Her most recent analysis looked at over 100 studies conducted on almost 3 million people. She found that people in the overweight category, with a BMI between 25.0-29.9 had the lowest all cause mortality of any of the weight categories. That means that people who are in the overweight category are least likely to die from any reason, and might also indicate that they have better longevity.

Many studies have found that being overweight in old age increases lifespan and ability to recover from health crises. This analysis expands those results to people of all ages. They are finding that measuring people's amount of fat is a faulty method of estimating people's disease risk.

They are finding that a healthy diet including mostly unprocessed food, low amounts of sugar, and healthy carbohydrate sources like fresh fruit, mild to moderate exercise, and plenty of sleep, 7-9 hours a night, do far more to prevent disease than "losing weight".

Weight loss is often a happy side affect of practicing these lifestyle habits, but new research is showing that if you stay 10-30 pounds "overweight" you might have achieved optimal health and longevity. You might be better off keeping those 10 pounds of "vanity weight" on your body.

Here are links to some articles and stuff I used to investigate the Obesity Paradox.

I found this Quartz article very illuminating.

This New York Times article was good.

The Obesity Paradox: When Thinner Means Sicker and Heavier Means Healthier by Carl Lavie, MD

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