Being slightly overweight lengthens your life

Being slightly overweight, that is, with a body mass index below 35 (obesity) but above what is commonly defined as one's ideal weight, would appear to reduce the risk of premature death.
This is the controversial finding reached by the study conducted by the team led by Dr Katherine Flegal, of the National Centre for Health Statistics at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Maryland (USA), which gathered data from more than 100 studies on the subject (the obesity-mortality relationship) from around the world, covering a sample of over 3 million people.

This is a second statistical study following the initial results already made public back in 2007, which had caused uproar and consternation in the global scientific community, to the point of being dismissed as "rubbish" by Professor Willet of the Harvard Public Health School.
And yet these results found space in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association and would demonstrate (at a statistical level) that a certain degree of excess weight (BMI between 30 and 34.9) would actually have a protective effect on humans, while an increased risk of premature death would occur in obese people (BMI > 35, with the risk rising to 29%) and in underweight people (BMI < 25, with the risk rising to 10%).
Dr Flegal and the team of researchers at the Maryland institute stress that the finding has statistical rather than medical significance, specifying therefore that the data should in no way make people feel free to eat anything and in immoderate quantities.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to note what the researchers put forward as a possible explanation for the surprising results of this research. Adipose tissue - the researchers state - has a protective effect on the heart, and "a few extra kilos" can even help an individual during periods of illness or hospitalisation (when appetite is lacking). Moreover, what matters most would not be so much the amount of fat, but rather how it is distributed across the individual's body mass. For example, the accumulation of fat on the hips (the so-called love handles) should be considered beneficial, whereas excess fat around the waistline is not a good sign.
The researchers conclude by stating that advances in medical science may significantly reduce the risks associated with being overweight, given that treatments for blood pressure and cholesterol have already proven capable of drastically reducing the number of deaths from cardiovascular disease. Finally, there is physical activity, which would be a real cure-all, capable of sufficiently counterbalancing even a substantial amount of excess weight: "fitness is more important than fatness".

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