Why is it considered unhealthy if someone is overweight even if all their blood tests, blood pressure, etc. all come back at healthy levels?

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Assumimg that being overweight is due to fat, not muscle.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Because of the combination of these factors:

* “Unhealthy” and “overweight” are both simplifications of complex things.
* Most people with a high body fat content are at increased risk for many bad health outcomes over the course of their life, even if they don’t currently have any of those outcomes.
* Body fat is very visible and a culturally-loaded signifier.
* Body fat has historic and ongoing connections to culturally important things – food, lifestyle, labor, and sexual attractiveness.

Current research indicates that high body fat beyond a certain range is consistently associated with health risks. There’s a lot of fuzziness about what “beyond a certain range” actually means; there is no hard line and *cannot* be such a line, given what we know about how variable individuals can be. Nevertheless, there is clearly a risk gradient somewhere; being 20 pounds over a given metric might not actually be much (or any) risk, but 100 pounds over is going to very likely be a risk, and 250 pounds over that metric is unquestionably a risk.

Others have pointed out the *nature* of that risk (primarily joint and heart impact, with some stress on other organs as well); but it’s hard to actually quantify the *extent* of the risk that without lots of extra information. We can’t just say, for example, “25 pounds overweight = 10% less healthy”.

So, does that mean that it’s “Unhealthy”? Depends. Culturally, “unhealthy” is only partly related to actual health risks of a given trait/substance/action – and another part is the social perception of that trait/substance/action, as well as a personal-judgement element. For example, most people wouldn’t look at a college football player and naturally call them “unhealthy” despite the well-established health risks of college football. Being a football player is generally a greater health risk than being 20 pounds overweight – but not a greater health risk than being 200 pounds overweight. So which of those things should be considered “unhealthy”? That’s in significant part a subjective judgement.

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