Comment by adam_arthur
1 day ago
I believe evidence points towards absolute level of fat being more important than % for overall health.
E.g. 20% bodyfat at 250lbs is still a lot of fat.
Of course it's difficult to ever get very high on absolute fat if at 15% or below.
Not sure I follow the logic here, but happy to be proven wrong if I'm misunderstanding. It's not intuitive to me that a 300 lb. person at 20% body fat is generally at the same risk as a 200 lb. person at 30% body fat.
Fat is inherently unhealthy for you beyond some low baseline level.
Additional muscle is positive for health, but only up to some reasonable threshold. There is no health benefit to having very high levels of muscle, and in fact it may be negative for your health at extreme levels. E.g. many bodybuilders have trouble breathing, sleep apnea etc.
Both people in the example have 60lbs of fat. 1lb of muscle doesn't cancel out the negative health effect of 1lb of fat
Looking for some references on these claims, thanks! What you're saying registers as "makes some sense, but where's the evidence?" to me. I'm not seeing the connection where total lbs of fat is inherently worse than higher percentage.
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The claim that fat is inherently unhealthy is probably too broad.
From what I have heard from doctors, there is a clear sequence:
intra-organ fat (really bad) > visceral fat (quite bad) > subcutaneous fat (relatively harmless).
The nasty detail is that some people gain relatively more visceral fat than others. These three fats are correlated, but the correlation isn't the same in every human. Some have better metabolism and don't store as much fat inside as others do.
Do short people have much lower risk of heart disease?
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Do you have a citation for that? I've had thoughts in a similar direction (specifically around the upper/lower intervention points) but have had no luck finding data.
Its not just absolute amount of fat though you also have to account for intra abdominal fat being much worse metabolically than subcutaneous fat.
Does that have to do with sizes of the heart and few other organs apparently being largely constant regardless of height?