CAN YOU BE FAT AND FIT?

For decades, scientific debate has raged about the role of exercise in diet loss. Today, there is greater scientific consensus that food intake is more important than exercise for losing weight. But the debate goes on about whether being fit mitigates the health risks of being overweight.

Central to the controversy is research from the Cooper Institute for Preventive Medicine in Dallas, which shows that over-60s who exercise have lower mortality regardless of how much body weight they carry. American health psychologist Dr Traci Mann from the University of Minnesota is currently the most prominent figure in asserting that overweight people can live healthy lives as long as they exercise.

She says there is no evidence that overweight people have shorter lifespans, there is just evidence that people who are sedentary, poor and medically neglected (who are also often obese) live shorter lives. “Obesity only really leads to shorter lifespans at the very highest weights,” she says.

There is no point in dieting, she claims. “To reduce your risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes, you don’t actually have to get thin, you just have to exercise.”

But the ‘ fat but fit’ camp has few supporters in the UK, and the theory has received a new setback from a recent study of 3.5 million GP records by the University of Birmingham. This found that ‘healthy’ obese people, who had normal blood pressure and cholesterol levels, were still at higher risk of serious disease than healthy people of normal weight. The obese people had 49 per cent increased risk of coronary heart disease, 7 per cent increased risk of stroke, and 96 per cent increased risk of heart failure.

Verdict: Obese people with healthy blood pressure and cholesterol still havean increased risk of heart problems and strokes.