Scientists Now Think that Being Overweight Can Protect Your Health (Harriet Brown)

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.

We don’t know as much as we would like about the complex relationship between weight and health. We don’t know for sure what the obesity paradox means and how to interpret it. Why does it inspire so much pushback?

Maybe the real paradox here lies in our assumptions about what constitutes normal weight.