Obesity paradox: Fatty people have the lowest risk of death

There is a paradox that exists for many years: people often think that obese people have bad health but according to statistics, ironically there are still many overweight people but that helps them to avoid quite a lot. fatal disease and the lowest mortality rate, lower than those with normal and thin weight. Why so? It is still unreasonable but no matter what, a good health can be ensured by a healthy lifestyle, proper diet and exercise.

Why are obese people the lowest group of people?

The paradox of obese people is at risk of many deadly diseases, but they are a group of people with low mortality

More than a decade ago, researchers found that patients with chronic diseases such as heart disease tend to eat better than others. This may be a promising finding, providing evidence to suggest a treatment for the disease. However, it is paradoxical that the protective factor for these patients is fat: the patients are overweight or obese.

Glenn Gaesser, director of the Institute for Healthy Life Research at the University of Arizona Research Institute, said: "Obesity always accounts for an important chapter in the health books of health consultants. And often , it is said that fat people are not healthy and lean people are stronger ".

Since the discovery of this contradiction, researchers have quickly focused on studying it and they call this paradoxical obesity. Carl Lavie, a cardiologist at Jefferson, Louisiana, was one of the first to officially announce this paradox with comment saying: "People think that can't happen. There must be something wrong. in statistical data ".

Looking for answers to paradoxes

And since then, dozens of studies have been conducted and confirmed overweight paradoxes exist. Overweight is now believed to help protect patients from long lists and increase diseases such as pneumonia, stroke, cancer, high blood pressure and heart disease. Researchers try to prove that this paradox is due to data being misrepresented or problematic. And while scientists still have not agreed on this paradox of human health, many people still agree with clear evidence of this data.

One of the researchers who disagreed with this paradox was Katherine Flegal at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Together with her colleagues, she surveyed hundreds of studies on mortality, filtering out data on body mass index (BMI - calculated as the ratio of the weight of 1 person in kilograms and dimensionality). Their height is in meters). People with BMI higher than 25 are classified as overweight and over 30 are obese.

Flegal found that people who are overweight to obesity are the ones with the lowest mortality rates . Although this group is also at risk of stroke and some other life-threatening diseases with higher rates. However, many other factors also affect the death rate of cardiovascular disease by 1 person. And there is a strong connection between weight and risk of disease in people who are severely obese. That is, the paradox is clear that obesity suffers from disease, but they have a lower risk of death.

Although the work based on 100 available studies and nearly 3 million people of Flegal is considered by many other scientists to be excessive, it is not necessary but in the end, the paradox has yet to have a satisfactory explanation. .One of the most commonly accepted explanations is that fat people are more actively treated than lean people because doctors always pay special attention to them. However, this explanation is still problematic: previous research has shown that overweight and obese people tend to avoid doctors, and therefore receive less appropriate treatment.

Moreover, according to a study led by French hormonal expert Boris Hansel based on 54,000 patients at risk of stroke and heart failure, the treatment for these patients is often the use of protective drugs such as satins or beta-blockers to prevent fat. But mild obese people are also treated by that drug whether they actually use it or not.

Another explanation for the paradox is that people with normal or lean weight may not be able to collect much data for research. Researchers know that people tend to lose weight at the end of their lives, but do not realize that they are sick. Smoking also makes people thin and sick. So for this paradox, researchers may unconsciously pool people who are dangerous and smokers with healthy people with normal weight. Since then, people with normal weight are less healthy than fat people.

However, the evidence supporting the explanation is still unclear. In a study conducted by Mercedes Carnethon at Northwestern University, the group eliminated people who died within two years of being diagnosed with the disease to identify those who did not know, but the results still show those Thin people still have high mortality rates. Later, she also analyzed data independently between smokers and non-smokers, the results still have not changed. And obesity paradox continues to exist.

Healthy lifestyle, proper diet, exercise is the key to health no matter what weight you are!

Some scientists propose a concept called Healthy Living at any weight (Health at Every Size - HES). Accordingly, if you only need to live healthy behaviors, including diet and physical activity, it will be more important for your health than just your weight.

Typically, exercise and research by Dr. Paul McAuley at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina reinforced this argument. He is a physical education researcher, who has spent nearly 20 years studying the impact of exercise on human health and, in the end, thinks that predicting health conditions depends a lot. into sports practice, not just weight.

Another study that supports HES is access by weight loss, which means that weight loss can be used to reduce cholesterol, blood pressure and many biomarkers in the body. Linda Bacon, professor of nutrition at University of California, San Francisco, said: "We are stuck with the fact that the only path to health is weight."

If HES is correct and more and more research supports it, then we can look back and conclude it is appropriately explained for the paradox of obesity. We still do not know the complex relationship between weight and health. We are not sure where paradoxical obesity is due and how to explain it.

From the perspective of a clinical psychologist, Professor Deb Burgard Los Altos, California, who has been treating for many patients with years of eating for years said: "Perhaps people have serious problems. I think that in theory, we should be happy to understand that people do not die the way we often think, that is not a terrible result. And so, people with large weight are still ok. "

So the ultimate obesity paradox still exists, are fat people even healthier than lean people? So where is a condition of perfect weight or that condition is bogus? Everyone regardless of weight is at risk for heart disease, fat people with heart disease sometimes have better health than people with heart disease. Is the fat concept, thin, just a hypothetical human idea? Anyway, a healthy lifestyle, proper diet combined with appropriate sports regimen is always a way for us to have a healthier life no matter what weight.