Can a person be obese but physically healthy? The effects of obesity are not offset by exercise, and being obese is therefore incompatible with the definition of “being healthy.” This is how bluntly is the latest study carried out by the University of Umeå (Sweden) and collected by the International Journal of Epidemiology.
And it is that obesity increases the risk of a series of serious health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, stroke or heart disease and taking into account that for some time now it has become a public health problem, the study wanted to find out if high physical or aerobic activity in obese men actually caused a compensation in the risk of mortality with respect to men with normal weight.
The researchers analyzed data from 1,317,713 men with a mean age of 18 and assessed their aerobic capacity using a bicycle test in which they asked the participants to pedal until they could no longer due to fatigue. In addition, they followed all study volunteers for 29 years. After this period, the experts discovered that men with normal weight – regardless of their physical level – had a 48% lower risk of mortality compared to obese men with high aerobic capacity
Although they observed a higher number of deaths among men with lower aerobic capacity, the work has also determined that the beneficial effect of a high aerobic capacity is reduced with greater obesity. Therefore, the obese, even if they exercise a lot, are not healthier or less exempt from the risk of death due to obesity . In addition, normal-weight men with low aerobic capacity still had a 30% lower risk of death than obese men who exercised frequently.
The study has the limitation that it has been exclusively male because they were conscripts in the army between 1969 and 1996. Be that as it may, the researchers believe that their results help to refute the idea that aerobic fitness can eliminate the consequences for obesity health.
