Obesity alone "does not increase the risk of premature death"

People who have healthy metabolic obesity, but no other metabolic risk factors, have no increased rate of mortality according to a new study from the University of York.

The study, "Individuals with Obesity was published in the journal Clinical Obesity.

The findings could change the way we think about obesity and health, says Jennifer Kuk, lead author of the study: "This is in contrast to most of the literature, we think that is because most studies have defined healthy metabolic obesity as having up to a metabolic risk factor. This is clearly problematic because hypertension alone increases your mortality risk and the earlier literature would have called these patients with obesity and hypertension, "healthy". This is probably the reason why most studies have reported that "healthy" obesity is still badociated with a higher mortality risk.

Kuk's study showed that unlike dyslipidemia, hypertension or diabetes alone, 54,889 men and women from five cohort studies that were clbadified as obese alone or grouped with a factor metabolic, or high blood sugar, blood pressure or lipids alone or grouped with obesity or other metabolism factor. The researchers examined how many people in each group died compared to those in the normal weight population without metabolic risk factors.

Current weight management guidelines suggest that anyone with a BMI greater than 30 kg / m2 should lose weight. This implies that if you have obesity even without other risk factors, it makes you unhealthy. The researchers found that 1 in 20 people with obesity did not have any other metabolic abnormalities.

"We show that people with metabolically healthy obesity are not at a high mortality rate. We found that a person of normal weight without other metabolic risk factors is just as likely to die as the person with obesity and no other risk factors. This means that hundreds of thousands of people in North America alone, suffering from metabolically healthy obesity, will be ordered to lose weight when one may wonder what benefit they will actually receive. "