Can you be healthy and obese?

By April Clarkson, April 27th, 2013 | Health | 0 Comments

Doctors have known for a while that although your Body Mass Index (BMI) may indicate that you are obese, you may not actually be that unhealthy.

The word obese conjures up images of people who are very overweight with many accompanying health complications, but in reality many people can lead healthy lives in the obese weight category. Obesity affects people in different ways and a study has looked at how doctors are classifying people as obese with suggestions that even the BMI calculation – developed in the 1980s – is an inappropriate measure which is flawed.

The study, which was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, wanted to answer the question: is BMI a figure which is trustworthy enough to determine who dies before their time?

BMI calculates a health score based on weight compared with height. Scores between 25 and 29 indicate that the person is classified as overweight, while anything over 30 is obese. During the study, an additional system was developed: anyone who was overweight was given a score of between one and four, based on a medical consultation. A score of one included complications such as high blood pressure, with a score of four including more serious conditions such as a severe disability or a chronic disease.

8,000 people were studied in the BMI report and were drawn from the National Health and Human Nutrition Examination Surveys, a US population cross-section. The measure which was developed by the research team and called the Edmonton Obesity Staging System goes some way into providing additional, more comprehensive ways to look at health and weight classifications.

“What the study clearly shows is you can’t make that [mortality] call based on BMI,” Sharma, of the research team, said. “You’re going to have to look at additional risk factors.”