I've read a few lengthy articles in the past couple of years, "pushing back" against the rising concern regarding the obesity epidemic; I blogged about one of them. These articles tend to claim that: 1) Fitness, not fatness, is the important thing; 2) That the hue and cry over fatness is, in large part, moralistic and aesthetically-driven, rather than health-driven.
Now it appears there is a large study that indicates that obesity is, in fact, a risk for heart disease independent of fitness, and the more significant of the two. In other words, obese and fit is not nearly as good as trim and fit (in fact, it appears that obese and fit is worse than trim and un-fit). I strongly suspected as much--though it is a perilous business to hang one's hat on the latest study, because surely there will be another that comes along to cast doubt on the predecessors!
The other thing I can't get over, in all these articles, is that they treat the "fat and fit" case as if it were a significant occurrence (which it certainly isn't, in my experience), rather than an interesting, but mostly hypothetical, alternative hypothesis.
8:25:14 PM 
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