Evidence: Fat People Can Be as Healthy as Thin People

If you live in the U.S., you are absolutely bombarded with the idea that being overweight is bad for your health. This repetition leaves one with the idea that being overweight is the same thing as being unhealthy, something that is simply not true.
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woman's foot on bathroom scale
woman's foot on bathroom scale

If you live in the U.S., you are absolutely bombarded with the idea that being overweight is bad for your health. This repetition leaves one with the idea that being overweight is the same thing as being unhealthy, something that is simply not true. In fact, people of all weights can be either healthy or unhealthy; overweight people (defined by BMI) may actually have a lower risk of premature death than "normal" weight people. Being fat is simply not the same thing as being unhealthy.

The Health at Every Size (HAES) movement attempts to interrupt the conflation of health and thinness by arguing that, instead of using one's girth as an indicator of one's health, we should be focusing on eating/exercising habits and more direct health measures (like blood pressure and cholesterol).

A recent study offered the HAES movement some interesting ammunition in this battle. The study recruited almost 12,000 people of varying BMIs and followed them for 170 months as they adopted healthier habits. Their conclusion? "Healthy lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index."

Their data shows that among people who live unhealthy lifestyles, being overweight increases the risk of premature death, and being obese much more so. But, among the normal weight, overweight, and obese with four healthy habits, the differential risk among them is essentially zero. For people with healthy habits, then, being fatter is not correlated with an increased relative risk of premature death. For everyone else in between, we more-or-less see the expected reduction in mortality risk given those two poles.

This data doesn't refute the idea that fat matters. In fact, it shows clearly that thinness is protective if people are doing absolutely nothing to enhance their health. It also suggests, though, that healthy habits can make all the difference. Overweight and obese people can have the same mortality risk as "normal" weight people; therefore, we should reject the idea that fat people are "killing themselves" with their extra pounds. It's simply not true.

h/t to BigFatBlog.

Originally posted at Sociological Images.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the principle writer for Sociological Images. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

For more by Lisa Wade, click here.

For more on personal health, click here.

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