# Health impact not from gaining fat, but from not being able to gain more/enough?



## Tad (Jul 28, 2016)

I saw this article linked on another fat site, and thought people here may be interested too:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/health/skinny-fat.html

In summary, some research is suggesting that much of the health issues associated with obesity actually occur when we exceed our ability to store fat. One leg of evidence is people with a rare disorder which gives them very little body fat, who end up with all the health issues associated with severe obesity. Another leg is studies in mice (which are obviously not humans), where they bread mice that have no effective limit on how fat they can get--the mice ended up massively fat but with none of the usual health complications. 

None of which provides immediate clues on how to help people with 'metabolic syndrome,' although it may explain those people who are very fat but don't have the usual fat related health issues -- their bodies may have the ability to simply store more fat.

Not addressed in the article, but I'd think a reasonable extrapolation may be that eating at a rate that your body can't keep up with, even if it is still able to store more at overall, could also create issues?


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## lucca23v2 (Jul 28, 2016)

This is why "fat" is such a relative term. I can feel stress on my body, my knees in particular at 350. Others can feel that stress if they are 30lbs over weight. 

It all depends on what your body can take and still function at 100%with no health issues. I do believe that there is a set weight where they body starts to health issues, but that is individual to each person. There is no magic number.


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## loopytheone (Jul 29, 2016)

I absolutely agree with Lucca. I think that everyone's body is different and has a different range of weights at which it can be healthy. 

That is a really interesting study Tad, it brings a different perspective that I hadn't thought of before. Thanks for sharing!


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## agouderia (Jul 29, 2016)

Very interesting article.

'One size fits all' doesn't work in clothing, even less so in medicine and health care.

Bodies aren't engines that all more or less run the same way - they're highly complex organisms which can come up with extremely different reactions to a treatment.

Alone looking at my personal micro-census (which of course is not statistically significant), it contradicts most health dogmas. 
With one exception, all women I know who have issues with high-cholesterol are life-long hyper-active skinny minnies. (One friend's mother, who is BMI19-thin at over 70 actually almost starved on the low fat & sugar diet she was put on because of the high cholesterol, contributing to a myocarditis).

With the exception of a mid-thirties 450-pounder who has been very obese for almost his entire life (so textbook case), all Type2 diabetics I personally know have been thin to average their entire lives - but most of them were either heavy smokers or inactive people who take a lot of medication for other issues.

I attended 2 funerals in the last 6 weeks - one was a 51-year old health nut - the other a 87-year old adult-life-long alcoholic. 

If health care doesn't learn to tailor treatments more to individual physical requirements, then many a medical progress might even be reversed.


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## quantumbits (Feb 23, 2017)

Interesting link Tad. Hello agouderia. *wink*

I have another one. They're apt to be insulin sensitive, despite being obese:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laron_syndrome#cite_note-pmid16817829-8
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/17longevity.html
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/aging...drome-may-unlock-cancer-diabetes-cure-n511266
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-lookup/doi/10.1210/jc.2003-031033
http://discovermagazine.com/2013/april/19-double-edged-genes


> Normally, people who are overweight face a greater risk for insulin resistance, a condition in which the body does not use insulin effectively to shuttle glucose into liver, fat, and muscle cells. To compensate, the pancreas secretes more insulin. In some cases, the amount of glucose in the bloodstream overwhelms the pancreas’s ability to keep up; in these cases, insulin resistance progresses to pre-diabetes or full-blown diabetes.
> 
> For people with Laron syndrome, a different set of rules seems to apply. Instead of being insulin resistant, Guevara-Aguirre’s patients seem to be especially sensitive to insulin, which may protect them against diabetes. He and Longo have recently conducted glucose-tolerance and insulin tests to explore how patients’ sensitivity to insulin affects their diabetes risk. They expect results later this year.
> 
> If the genetic mutation that gives people with Laron syndrome their short stature also protects them against two of the most pernicious diseases of aging, diabetes and cancer, then it prompts two obvious questions: What other diseases might the mutation protect against, and do people who carry the mutation in fact live longer than their unaffected peers?


 So they're obese but don't suffer some (or many) of its normal negative effects. It's anti-cancer.

They suffer more accidents due to their small size, more alcoholism and convulsive disorders. Average lifespan.

Image below from discovermagazine: http://discovermagazine.com/~/media/Images/Issues/2013/April/genes-2.jpg?mw=900&mh=600


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