Researchers immediately began trying to explain this “obesity paradox”—or, more often, to explain it away. Carl Lavie, a cardiologist in Jefferson, Louisiana, was one of the first clinicians to describe the paradox. It took him over a year to find a journal that would publish his findings. “People thought, ‘This can’t be true. There’s got to be something wrong with their data’,” he told Quartz.
Since then, dozens of studies have confirmed the existence of the paradox. Being overweight is now believed to help protect patients with an increasingly long list of medical problems, including pneumonia, burns, stroke, cancer, hypertension, and heart disease. Researchers who have tried to show that the paradox is based on faulty data or reasoning have largely come up short. And while scientists do not yet agree on what the paradox means for health, most accept the evidence behind it. “It’s been shown consistently enough in different disease states,” says Gregg Fonarow, a cardiology researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. [...]
Even scientists whose own research has identified the paradox often seem ambivalent about the possibility that it might hold true. Carnethon has published several studies documenting the link between overweight or obese and better survival rates among people with type two diabetes. Yet like nearly every researcher I’ve interviewed on the subject, she resists the idea that fat might not always be unhealthy. “We’d never want to back away from weight-loss recommendations,” she says.
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