You Can’t Be Fit and Fat

It’s okay to be heavy, as long as you don’t have diabetes or hypertension–right? While the bulk of studies warn about the dangers — to the heart, liver, kidneys and other body systems — of gaining weight, a small number of trials suggested that some overweight or obese individuals may be as healthy as their normal weight counterparts, since they had normal blood pressure, no diabetes and relatively stable cholesterol levels. In fact, one study found that overweight individuals (but not obese people) tended to live longer than those of normal weight. The researchers, from Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada, found that people who tipped the scales at above their recommended body mass index (BMI) but did not have abnormal cholesterol or blood pressure, for example, still had a higher risk of dying from heart disease over an average of about 10 years compared to metabolically healthy individuals within normal weight ranges.