Often, fat and high body mass index are touted as the culprits behind anything and everything that goes wrong with your body. Leave aside obesity, but is just being
overweight really bad for you? The “health at every size” movement may tell you that you can be healthy at all sizes but the movement has its own pitfalls. So, what do the experts have to say?
Most experts agree that if you fall into the obese category, you definitely are at increased risk of most diseases. A research published in the
Archives of Internal Medicine stated that people who are overweight have a fifty per cent chance of getting a high cholesterol reading, high blood pressure, or even elevated blood sugar. Against this, an obese person’s chances are straight away upped to two third, whereas that of a normal weighted person are one third.
However, what complicates the matter is that whether relying on weighing scale or
BMI does justice to telling you about your health. What it can't distinguish between are fat and muscle. For example, professional sportspersons usually have higher BMI levels but that's because they have significant muscle and not fat.
But, let's say, even these parameters are not considered. Then, just being a little on the higher side increases one's chances of health conditions? For example, a study published in 2005 by
Katherine Flegal stated that being 'overweight', and not obese, was not associated to a heightened risk of death by even one per cent.
What's exclamatory is the finding she published in 2013. It stated that people with BMI scores between 25 to 30, which mean they are overweight, had a 6 per cent lower risk of dying early than normal BMI people. This means that in terms of early mortality, being overweight is actually better than having a BMI in the normal range! That paper of hers has witnessed much criticism but her efforts continued relentlessly.
The critics published a study in 2016 stating how with every extra inch of fat above your normal BMI, your chances of early mortality increase.
Flegal criticized their paper by stating that they were just basing their studies on already existing papers and are not conducting new research.
But it can't be denied that after Flegal’s efforts, the importance of 'heaviness' is much regarded and studied. In fact, the same was also established to be true by 2000s. Surprisingly, in 2000, the healthiest BMI had been shifted to 27, which is overweight, from 23.7 in 1970s.
So, does this mean a person with normal BMI should gain weight? No. All the researchers who justified the up sides of being healthy meant that
weight is not that big an issue as it is often deemed to be as. What is important is that one follows an active way of life, gets regularly screened and does not suffer from lifestyle health conditions.
