When Fat People Don't Die Like You Said They Would

Most of the interactions that fat people have with healthcare professionals can be boiled down to “Lose weight or you’re going to DIE!”

Guess what? We’re all going to die one day, fat or thin or in between. What the doctors and nurses and other providers mean, of course, is that you are going to die prematurely based on your given life expectancy for your socioeconomic class and region (which we can debate the merits of at another time).

Except now there’s evidence that some fat might actually provide protection against disease and not cause premature death at all… say WHAAAAAAAAT?

Researchers are calling it the “obesity paradox,” which is a bullshit name for the antithesis of a bullshit epidemic that doesn’t exist, but I’ll allow it. At its core, the so-called paradox is that some extra weight—individuals in the overweight or mildly obese BMI categories—offers a protective benefit against a list of diseases including (but not limited to) pneumonia, cancer, burns, heart disease, stroke, and hypertension.

All of this is from an article in Quartz about the “obesity paradox.” It should come as no surprise that researcher after researcher has tried to deny these findings after data from over 100 studies and over 3 million people had been incorporated. First they attacked the data. When nothing wrong could be found there, they attacked the patient populations.

The upshot is, no one can make the “paradox” go away. No matter how they crunch the data or reconfigure the patient groups, the evidence is still there.

So how come healthcare professionals still stigmatize and shame fat people? Shouldn’t this mean that fat people are treated the same or even better than thin people who statistically will have worse outcomes in these areas?

No, of course not. That’d be ridiculous. It’d run counter to decades of fat bias and diet industry conditioning that thin is always healthy and fat is always unhealthy.

Source: https://qz.com/550527/obesity-paradox-scientists-now-think-that-being-overweight-is-sometimes-good-for-your-health/

According to the article, even the researchers whose work helped to identify the paradox don’t know what it means and do not back away from recommendations that fat people should lose weight to be healthy. The article concludes that HAES seems to be the best way forward and that research has shown that a HAES approach (opposed to a weight-loss approach) “…leads to lower cholesterol, blood pressure, and other metabolic markers.”

But the idea that a fat body can be healthy and actually be protected from poor outcomes from disease is such an anathema that it seems like people can’t wrap their heads around it. The article stops short of examining why that is. My guess is money related to the diet industry (ie, being paid for their research by the diet industry or sponsored as key opinion leaders by the diet industry), internalized fat phobia, and learned fat bias.

The article also does not give critical information on the debunking of BMI and the fact that it never was an indicator of health. So even the basis of the research on this paradox is pretty much bullshit. But the good news for us is that weight cannot and should not be used as a measure of our worth or our health. Even the scientists don’t know what it all means.