Plump People Live Longer

You can take your ideal body mass index and height-to-weight numbers and stick 'em where the sun don't shine:

About two years ago, a group of federal researchers reported that overweight people have a lower death rate than people who are normal weight, underweight or obese. Now, investigating further, they found out which diseases are more likely to lead to death in each weight group.

Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights, they report that overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

As a consequence, the group from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute reports, there were more than 100,000 fewer deaths among the overweight in 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, than would have expected if those people had been of normal weight.
Their paper is published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The researchers also confirmed that obese people and people whose weights are below normal have higher death rates than people of normal weight. But, when they asked why, they found that the reasons were different for the different weight categories.

Some who studied the relation between weight and health said the nation might want to reconsider what are ideal weights.

If I took those height-to-weight recommendations seriously, I'd probably have to grow a foot taller to meet their numbers. I don't think that's going to be possible.

I have only anecdotal evidence to back up the report above, but when I got married 20 years ago I was the skinniest I had ever been as an adult - 6' 5" 174 pounds. I looked like a refugee. I had been losing weight for months (down from 240) and finished off the weight loss with a nasty bout of mono. When I was skinny my cholesterol was probably fine, but I got sick a lot. It seems like every cold and flu that came along got me. I ended up in the hospital in 1994 with pneumonia.

Over the years I put the weight (and them some) back on and went from some being sick a lot to being sick...never. I rarely ever get a cold (I get a flu shot every year at the advice of my pneumonia doctor) and hardly ever get really sick. I think there's something to the idea that maintaining the ideal minimum weight recommended by the "experts" may in fact leave your immune system short of ammunition to fight off the bugs you come in contact with every day.

Pleasantly plump may in fact be the ideal weight.