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Fatties rejoice!
This article says that being overweight or obese isn't bad for your health, but being sedentary is. A taste:
- Over the past 20 years, scientists have gathered a wealth of evidence indicating that cardiovascular and metabolic fitness, and the activity levels that promote such fitness, are far more important predictors of both overall health and mortality risk than weight. Yet none of the studies most often cited for the proposition that fat kills makes any serious attempt to control for these variables.
The most extensive work of this sort has been carried out by Steven Blair and his colleagues at Dallas's Cooper Institute, involving more than 70,000 people. What they have discovered is that, quite simply, when researchers take into account the activity levels and resulting fitness of the people being studied, body mass appears to have no relevance to health whatsoever. In Blair's studies, obese people who engage in at least moderate levels of physical activity have around one half the mortality rate of sedentary people who maintain supposedly ideal weight levels.
So we can all laugh at the overweight SF aerobics instructor, but it sounds like she's going to outlive most of us.
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“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
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