What’s Happening: Healthy Obesity?

The headlines lately have been full of a new study that asked whether it was possible to be both healthy and overweight. If you’re obese, but you eat well, exercise regularly, don’t have diabetes or any metabolic problems, and are otherwise healthy, are you at any higher risk of disease than a thin person?

The researchers’ results showed that metabolic health is a much better predictor of risk than weight. From a health perspective, it’s better to be fat but metabolically healthy than it is to be thin and insulin resistant. Some comments:

• Sarah Lord at Healthy Urban Kitchen compares the headlines to what the study actually said: unsurprisingly, the headlines were very misleading, focusing on the tiny difference between metabolically healthy thin people and metabolically healthy fat people instead of seeing the big picture.
• Ragen Chastain at Dances with Fat points out that the study didn’t control for cardiovascular fitness, and also failed to consider several other factors, making any results questionable at best.
• Anna Almendrala at the Huffington Post with another critique.
• Charlotte at The Great Fitness Experiment offers her thoughts on the new study as it relates to body image.

In other news this week:

• Warning: this link is not appropriate for children. And if you’re eating, you might also want to save it for later. Rolling Stone posted a viscerally powerful exposé of the factory-farm system – read it once, and you won’t be able to walk past the cheap meat in Wal-Mart again without feeling sick to your stomach.

• In related news, the USDA has “banned” antibiotics as growth enhancers in livestock husbandry – and by “banned,” they mean “politely asked companies to volunteer to stop using them.” So in other words, nothing has changed.

• At this point, you could probably use a laugh, so check out this list of the 5 weirdest ways to lose weight from Cranky Fitness.

• For a little good news on the meat front, NPR reports on how eating meat helped make humans…human.

• Denise Minger, whose takedown of The China Study serves as an antidote to judgmental vegans everywhere, has published her book, Death by Food Pyramid! If you’ve ever wanted the full story behind those “6-11 servings of heart-healthy whole grains,” but couldn’t quite stomach the incessant low-fat line in Marion Nestle’s writing, this is the book for you.

• Getting Stronger reports on back pain: where it comes from, how diet is relevant, and what you can do.

Do you think it would be better if doctors and the media focused more on health and less on weight? Let us know on Facebook and Google+.