On a private mailing list we were discussing the Body Mass Index. Now, I’m definitely overweight at just over 17 stone. I reckon I should be somewhere between 14 and 15 stone; but according to the BMI that’s the high end, and at 6’3" (6’4" in the morning) 12 stone is a good weight to be.
Now I remember that when I was younger, I sufferred considerably from ill-health and had quite marked food allergies. At 12 stone I was thin as a rake. And I used to weigh even less. Since I put on weight, I’ve been really healthy: 1-2 days off work a year maximum from colds (nothing more serious), and my food allergies have all but disappeared.
It isn’t crap. There was a reputable study within the last two years that found that people who were moderately overweight where healthier than people underweight. Maybe that isn’t so surprising but they also found the moderately overweight to have a lower risk of dying than people within the normal BMI range.
Hit submit too soon. Here are summaries of several reputable studies. Not everything is clear but having a below normal BMI appears to be fairly bad in terms of death risk.
I’ve wondered about the details of that study. For example, is it possible that at least some of the underweight people were underweight because of some underlying health condition? Couldn’t there be some sort of confusion of cause and effect? To put it another way, wouldn’t being in reasonably good health to begin with make it easier to become overweight?
I’m 5’4" and about 115 lbs, which puts my BMI at 19.7, within the “normal” range. However, my doctor considers me to be underweight and is constantly nagging me to eat more fats.
I do have health problems, but they’re ones I would have at any weight. A couple of them were inherited from my parents and the other problem I have was caused by a car accident.
I’ve got a pretty good immune system. My husband’s workplace is a flu-bug factory, so if I had a lesser immune system, I’d constantly be getting sick.
Yes, but that’s irrelevant to what the study says: if the health of underweight people is skewed by the very poor health of a few underweight people, then underweight people as a whole are still less healthy than overweight people.
There have been studies showing exactly the opposite, also–that slightly underweight people tend to live longer than people of ideal weight.