Most Overweight or Obese Persons are at Risk of Metabolic Illnesses -- But Not All

Several years back,  CBSNews reported that a Centers for Disease (CDC) study indicated "that people who are modestly overweight actually have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight."  The study results confused many people because they seemed to imply that being overweight was not the serious problem Americans believed it to be. Then another study  highlighted in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that both obesity and overweight are serious problems. Still, in the final analysis, being overweight or obese may not be unhealthy for some people. A recent study concludes that there is a small set of obese persons who are metabolically healthy.

According to Martin Obin, a scientist with the USDA, 'These people, [are] called the metabolically healthy obese (MHO).' They 'are as fat as people who develop complications of obesity, yet they are protected from these complications...' Obin indicates that knowing how these MHO individuals are protected from metabolic diseases could lead to a better understanding of how obesity influences the diseases.

Obin believes that fat cells function differently in MHO persons compared to those obese individuals who become metabolically unhealthy. And this difference causes more inflammation in the metabolically unhealthy individuals than in the metabolically healthy.

But still, for most people, being overweight or obese raises the risks of comorbidities, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, asthma, sleep apnea, and cancer. These comorbidities might be associated with the increased inflammation related to obesity. As one researcher concluded, "While normal inflammation is an important part of our body’s healing response, runaway inflammation can contribute to chronic and life-threatening diseases."

It appears that some obese persons may have a relatively healthy level of inflammation. Therefore, understanding how metabolically obese healthy individuals might maintain this relatively healthy level of inflammation could enable researchers to develop treatments that can be used to make obese unhealthy individuals more healthy. Of course, improving the metabolic health of an obese individual does not lessen the impact of the extra weight on the obese persons skeleton. But developing an effective treatment for improving metabolic health could buy time for the obese individual to lose the weight.

 

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