Just a quick comment taking on the “fat but fit” mantra you’ll see almost everywhere today – here’s a quick read (Debunking the ‘obesity paradox’: Can fat be fit?), published on the 17th over on MDLinx, an internal medicine aggregator site.
Simply put, the obesity paradox, not to be confused (though it often is) with the fat paradox (working on a series related to the fat paradox to follow), stems from a group of research studies in which the august clinicians suggested that being obese (or overweight), particularly when looking at the elderly, wasn’t a bad thing, didn’t induce deleterious impacts, but in fact was protective (both for cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality).
The linked article above reports the key findings in recent three studies arguing otherwise (recently published in the European Heart Journal, The Lancet, and JAMA Cardiology), which clearly demonstrate that higher BMIs lead to greater incidence of cardiovascular problems in particular.
I don’t have time today to go into details here, though we’ll be revisiting this concept here on the blog over the next several weeks. The linked article above provides a very readable summary and links out to the three studies mentioned.
More to come.
