This is an article I saw:
For the past couple years, the headlines have been screaming about
an American obesity "epidemic." According to some studies, fully
one-third of the U.S. population is clinically obese. And, at any
given time, anywhere from 15 to 35 % of Americans are trying to
lose weight.
Do they need to be?
Yes, say the majority of specialists. After all, being overweight
has been linked to a host of illnesses from heart disease to
hypertension. But a vocal fringe of nutritionists and doctors are
beginning to question this conventional wisdom. According to them,
it is possible to be both fat and fit.
Take Joanne Ikeda, a nutritionist at the University of California
at Berkeley, "It's not about how we can help people lose weight;
it's about how we can help them be healthier." Despite popular
diets' one-size-fits-all claims, she says there is not one single
way to be healthy.
And Paul Campos, law professor at the University of Colorado and
author of The Obesity Myth, agrees. "What a healthy weight is for
you as an individual has little or nothing to do with what a
healthy weight is for anybody else," he explains. "Within a very
broad range, a healthy weight is the weight that a particular
individual maintains while living a healthy life."
"Fat activist" (yes, there are such folks) Marylin Wann adds,
"[Even] if everyone ate nothing but boneless, skinless chicken
breasts and brown rice and exercised an hour a day, people would
still have different shapes and sizes."
These chubby cheerleaders say there is solid science backing up
their claims. They point to a 1999 study, published in the American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which followed almost 22,000 men for
an average of eight years to assess risk factors that predispose
individuals to an early death.
"Lean unfit people actually had a higher risk of death than the
"overfat" physically fit people," says Dr. Andrew Jackson,
professor at the University of Houston and one of the study's
authors.
Other scientists disagree. Indeed, in 2004, a different study in
The New England Journal of Medicine slammed the Clinical Nutrition
study as "limited and inconsistent," and found that obesity
predicted a higher risk of death regardless of the level of
physical activity.
Frank Hu, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and
first author of the New England Journal study (which tracked
116,564 women over 24 years), explained that active obese people
did indeed reduce their mortality risk. But they were still at 91%
greater risk of dying than active lean people. Sedentary lean
people had a 55% greater risk of mortality. "If you're obese, you
can reduce your risk of mortality by eating nutritiously and
exercising, but you're not home free," says Hu.
JoAnn Manson, chief of preventative medicine at Harvard's Brigham
Hospital and coauthor of the study, agrees: "Being fit and fat is
better than being unfit and fat, but it's not as good as being fit
and lean."
