Obese but healthy, is it possible?
Overweight people are more likely to develop heart disease. So it may not be possible to be obese but healthy.
A new study suggests that even when overweight or obese people are free of health complications, they are still more likely to develop heart disease than people who are not overweight. So it may not be possible to be obese but healthy. In the study, even when they were free of diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol, they had a modestly high risk of having a stroke, almost a 50 percent higher risk of coronary heart disease, and almost double the risk of developing heart failure than people who were not overweight and had similar metabolic health. “The bottom line is that metabolically healthy obesity does not exist,” said Dr. Rishi Caleyachetty, of the College of Medical and Dental Sciences at the University of Birmingham in England. Who was the lead author of the article, published in the journal of the American College of Cardiology. “Obesity is not benign.” Jennifer W. Bea, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Arizona Cancer Center, who co-authored an editorial accompanying the new study, said, “We haven’t seen the whole story yet,” and questioned whether someone could be obese but “metabolically healthy.” One of the messages “is that metabolic health is important regardless of your weight,” Dr. Bradshaw said. The new study found that underweight people with no metabolic problems had a higher risk of stroke than normal-weight, overweight or obese people without metabolic problems, and if they also had metabolic problems, their risk increased even more. Curiously, doctors often don’t express much about the risks of being too skinny. So we must not deceive ourselves, eating problems, whether overweight or lack thereof, involve more risks.
