While obesity is known to cause a variety of medical problems, one of which being heart disease, the popular way of determining obesity may not be useful when trying to predict your risk from Heart Disease.
Turns out the Body Mass Index (BMI) is not a good predictor or heart disease, even though it does indicate whether or not you are overweight. The BMI is a calculation based on your weight and height ratio. New research has given some surprising results; the subjects with the lowest BMI were the ones with a higher death rate, from both heart disease and other causes. This doesn’t mean that being heavier means you will be healthier though! Obesity and general excess weight has proven to bring medical complications, but in the case of heart disease we do need better ways to measure the risks.
It may be easier to understand the results if we briefly go over how BMI is calculated: it is a general comparison of a person’ weight and height. So you can calculate your BMI by dividing weight (in Kg) by height (in meters squared). But, there is a big BUT: a “heavy” person could be heavy yet hardly have any body fat: muscle weighs more than fat and athletes generally weight quite a bit, even though their appearance is slim and toned.
So basically many people with a higher BMI could be fitter than people with a lower BMI. It then makes sense that these individuals have fewer heart problems.
Caution is always needed when we look at new studies and new findings; we cannot just assume what seems to be said is actually true: we cannot assume that being heavier (have more fat) is harmless or even healthy, instead we have to analyze other possible explanations for these results, in this case the fact that muscle does weigh more than fat, and heavier people could be more fit on average.