Being obese can save your life

[Cali_Democrat]

When Being Obese Could Save Your Life
Posted: 07/17/2014 8:05 am EDT

You've just had a heart attack, and you're in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. If you're overweight or moderately obese, you're actually more likely to survive that heart attack than if you were a normal weight or underweight person.

It's what doctors and researchers call the "obesity paradox." While being overweight probably helped land you in the hospital with a heart attack in the first place, that extra weight could work in your favor after the fact. In fact, dozens of studies from the past several years indicate that people who are overweight or moderately obese according to the body mass index are more likely to survive chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease, kidney disease and diabetes than normal weight or underweight people.

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"It's very provocative to go out and say obesity isn't as bad as we thought -- to announce to the world that there are good things about obesity, too," Kalantar-Zadeh told The Huffington Post. "But the truth is that there is [an] emerging set of data over the past several years suggesting that obesity is not as black and white as we have maintained for the past 30 to 40 years."

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/17/obesity-paradox_n_5592606.html

You should probably think twice before turning down that double bacon cheeseburger.

[klook]

1. I'm gonna start deducting milk shakes and pie on my taxes

as health expenses.

[KinMd]

2. Man,I'm gonna live forever!!

On my way to McDonalds...purely for health reasons you understand

[redqueen]

3. The details are interesting.

...

The second, an observational study of almost 48,000 heart surgery patients that was led by Dr. Carl Lavie of the John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute, digs a little bit deeper into the paradox. Instead of simply using body weight to compare patients, Lavie used a formula to estimate both the patients' body fat percentage and lean mass percentage (organs, bone, muscle) and compared those characteristics.

He concluded that it's the healthy lean mass -- not fat -- that could be protecting patients once they suffer from a cardiovascular outcome. In fact, higher lean body mass was associated with 29 percent lower risk of death.

WRONG DATA, WRONG CONCLUSIONS?

A lot of data supporting the obesity paradox would disappear if researchers followed Lavie's example and relied on more comprehensive data points than simply BMI, said Dr. Jonathan Myers, a clinical professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and health research scientist at the VA hospital in Palo Alto, CA.

"One of the problems with the obesity paradox is that we've been making the wrong measurements," Myers told HuffPost. "Most of these studies only have BMI available, and what we really want to measure is body composition -- namely, how much visceral fat you have, which is associated with high metabolic risk."

...

[La Lioness Priyanka]

4. recent researchs show that weight and metabolic disease is far more complex

than we like to believe. hence, fat shaming remains a prejudice borne from a presumed violation of the protestant work ethic. not a concern for the obese.