Is it true that 'healthy obesity' boosts death risk?
Metabolically healthy obesity — also known as "healthy obesity" — describes obesity not accompanied by metabolic health complications, such as diabetes, hypertension, or high cholesterol.
There are many debates about how "healthy" metabolically healthy obesity actually is, and whether it renders people more vulnerable to other health problems in the long run.
As recently as last month, Medical News Today reported on a study that suggested that healthy obesity does, in fact, put certain people at a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
But what about the risk of premature death? This is the question asked by a team of researchers from York University in Toronto, Canada, and the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
The researchers — whose efforts were guided by Jennifer Kuk, an associate professor at the School of Kinesiology and Health Science at York University — found that obesity alone, in the absence of hypertension, dyslipidemia (high cholesterol), and diabetes, is not associated with a heightened mortality risk.
These findings — which are described in a paper published in the journal Clinical Obesity — counter previous assumptions and may pose important questions about current guidelines regarding the care of people diagnosed with obesity.
