Thinner people than intermediate BMI levels also die earlier, which is an aspect of the 'obesity paradox'.

“that started to be talked about 10 15 years ago maybe”

“what if obesity makes it more likely that you get a major illness or injury so it's not good for your health in that sense age of course also makes it more likely that you get a major illness or injury but once you get a major illness or injury being heavier more obese may reduce your risk of dying from it”

“that's one part the other part is that even though obesity is associated with increased mortality rate or decreased longevity that when you look at people who are sick or injured they often live the longest so somebody comes in with kidney failure or someone comes in after a major injury or a major infection they're in the hospital it's often the heaviest people that live longer”

“the other part is that even though obesity is associated with increased mortality rate or decreased longevity that when you look at people who are sick or injured they often live the longest so somebody comes in with kidney failure or someone comes in after a major injury or a major infection they're in the hospital it's often the heaviest people that live longer”

“i think the that phrase obesity paradox has never been really crisply defined and whether it really is something that's a paradoxes not clear”

“One thing is that there's this so-called u-shaped curve more accurately concave upward there's a bathtub shaped curve if you imagine a cartesian or xy plot in which the y or ordinate is mortality rate or some function of it and the x is bmi or relative body weight or something so one is that it is u-shaped that it's not monotonic increasing and so people at the very thin end also die earlier than people in the middle just as people at the very heavy end die earlier than people in the middle”

“but it actually became pretty controversial with a series of studies that was published catherine flegel was intimately involved in this work suggesting that there was actually not the relationship people thought there was between body mass index and mortality so these studies which were this was labeled as the obesity paradox because what they found is that there wasn't really much of an association between obesity and poor health outcomes and often if you look at the relationship between bmi and mortality if you just look at a graph of it the the nader the lowest point on that graph was in the overweight range or sometimes even on the low end of the obese range depending on what the study was and they were finding this in meta analyses of millions and millions of people”