• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Study Shows Fit And Fat Can Be Healthy

Posted on: Tuesday, 12 August 2008, 09:30 CDT

Fat and healthy? Researchers believe its an accurate combination in a new study that found about half of overweight adults have normal blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

Being thin does not necessarily protect people, either. Close to a quarter of normal-weight U.S. adults in one study had risk factors for heart disease or diabetes.

"We really don't know as much about obesity as we think we do," said Judith Wylie-Rosett of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, who oversaw the study.

"A considerable proportion of overweight and obese U.S. adults are metabolically healthy, whereas a considerable proportion of normal-weight adults express a clustering of cardiometabolic abnormalities," Wylie-Rosett and Rachel Wildman and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

The first national research of its kind backs the argument that you can be hefty but still healthy.

Study author MaryFran Sowers, a University of Michigan obesity researcher, said the results prove that stereotypes about body size can be misleading, and that even "less voluptuous" people can have risk factors commonly associated with obesity.

“We're really talking about taking a look with a very different lens" at weight and health risks, Sowers said.

Researchers looked at data on 5,440 men and women who were examined and filled out questionnaires for the National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys between 1999 and 2004. Most exercised little.

The study found just over 51 percent of those who were overweight, and 31.7 percent of those who were obese, had healthy levels of cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure and other measures linked to heart disease.

These measures have been shown in many other studies to predict heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and other heart disease, although this particular study did not look at whether people suffered any of these problems.

However, a quarter of adults in the recommended-weight range had unhealthy levels of at least two of these measures. That means some 16 million of them are at risk for heart problems.

Sowers said, it's no secret that thin people can develop heart-related problems and that fat people often do not. But that millions defy the stereotypes will come as a surprise to many people.

There's heated debate about the accuracy of the standard method of calculating whether someone is overweight.

Health officials use the body mass index, a weight-height ratio that does not distinguish between fat and lean tissue. The limits of that method were highlighted a few years ago when it was reported that the system would put nearly half of NBA players in the overweight category.

Other experts say waist size is a more accurate way of determining someone's health risks.

Dr. Robert Eckel, a former American Heart Association president and professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, said the new research might help dismiss some of the generalizations that are sometimes made about weight and health.

The study found risk factors for heart problems were generally more common in older people, smokers and inactive people for all weight categories.

Among obese people who were 50 to 64, just 20 percent were considered healthy compared with half of younger obese people.

Wylie-Rosett said, the results emphasis how important exercise is for staying healthy, even for people of healthy weight.

The authors said that fat tissue releases hormones and other substances that affect things like blood vessels, cholesterol and blood sugar.

Elevated blood pressure, cholesterol and other factors were more common for people with larger waists or potbellies. This often signals internal fat deposits surrounding abdominal organs, which previous research has shown can be problematic.

When studying overweight and obese adults, those in the "healthy" category tended to have smaller waists than those with at least two risk factors.

---

On the Net:

• Archives of Internal Medicine
• American Heart Association
• Albert Einstein College of Medicine
• University of Michigan

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

More News in this Category