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Passage Five
Is it possible to be both fat and fit-not just fit enough to exercise, but fit enough to live as long as someone a lot lighter? Not according to a 2004 study from the Harvard School of Public Health which looked at 115,000 nurses aged between 30 and 55. Compared with women who were both thin and active, obese(overweight) but active women had a mortality rate that was 91﹪ higher. Though far better than the inactive obese (142% higher), they were still worse off than the inactive lean (5% higher). A similar picture emerged in 2008 after researchers examined 39,000 women with an average age of 54. Compared with active women of normal weight, the active but overweight were 54% more likely to develop heart disease.
That’s settled, then. Or is it? Steven Blair, a professor of exercise science at the University of South Carolina, describes the official focus on obesity as an “obsession… and it’s not grounded in solid data”.
Blair’s most fascinating study, in the Journal of American Medical Association in 2007, took 2,600 people aged 60 and above, of various degrees of fatness, and tested their fitness on the exercise device, rather than asking them to quantify it themselves. This is an unusually rigorous approach, he claims. Since many rival surveys ask participants to assess their own fitness, or ignore it as a factor altogether.
“There is an ‘association’ betwe...