The conclusion? While obesity, defined in the study as a Body Mass Index, or BMI, of at least 30, leads to early death and the onset of dozens of disease states, those with a BMI between 25 and 30 showed no increase risk of death from heart disease or cancer.

So, should you just forget about those love handles after all? Not so fast.

First, this study analyzed “death”, not “life”. Quality of life, or the state of living in optimum health and energy, was overlooked in favor of sheer mortality statistics.

These statistics can be vastly skewed. For example, there are millions of overweight Americans with heart disease, forced to live on medications and at a considerably slower pace, who do not “die” from the condition.

Dr. Robert Eckel, a spokesperson from the American Medical Association, disagreed with the conclusions and the false impressions of the study. He stated that, for example, diabetes (found to be much higher among even moderately overweight individuals) often goes hand in hand with heart disease.

Also, the researchers used the rather inaccurate BMI to judge their findings. What’s my problem with the BMI? At under ten percent body fat, I have a BMI of 26. This would put me into the “overweight but healthy” camp — yet I am far from overweight. My additional muscle mass throws off the BMI scale. Other factors can cause the BMI to be less reliable than actual body fat percentage, ranging from water retention to bone density. The use of hydrostatic weight, or even calipers to measure body fat, would have provided a far more accurate examination of the data.

The researchers also failed to take into account the fact that abdominal fat, also known as visceral fat, has been shown to lead to metabolic syndrome. A study presented at the 23rd Annual American Medical Association Science Reporters Conference in Washington, D.C. revealed that metabolic syndrome nearly triples heart disease risk, even in “non-obese individuals”, and that visceral body fat is the strongest of the predictors for the condition.

Many people with a large amount of visceral fat are not technically obese when judged by the BMI.

Moreover, this study fails to look at the quality of one’s life — only the cause of death. Most of us would not want to spend the last ten or fifteen years of our life on drugs, machines and in a state of infirmity, even if it meant we would technically outlive the onset of heart disease or cancer.

I have yet to meet one person who decreased their body fat in a healthy manner who did not also increase their energy and passion for life. Yet, from personal experience, I can say with certainty that an extra twenty-five pounds of fat will rob that energy and vitality faster than you can say, “Pass the stuffing, please.”

This prompts a question that no study can answer: What is the value of thriving, excelling, and achieving our best in every area of our life, including our body? And, what will this mentally empowered state do for our mortality?

Something tells me it will increase it far beyond what we can measure.

[jB]