Actually, I'm pretty sure some of the recent studies have found that the ideal BMI in terms of longevity is in the current "overweight. So yes, there is some evidence that being "underweight" and "normal" is actually less healthy than being a little bit overweight.
So, if fat-acceptance (you know, treating fat people like people instead of worthless unloveable pieces of crap to be made fun of) is bad, then I suppose thin and normal acceptance must be bad too. Hence, we ought to start treating thin and normal people like we treat fat people in hopes that it will motivate them to gain a few pounds.
Actually, that isn't true;
http://healthscience.org/index.php?...u-pt-2&catid=102:jeff-novicks-blog&Itemid=267
written by j.novick
Monday, 21 July 2008 00:00
To continue where we left off in our discussion of body weight, disease risk and longevity...
When studies have tried to factor out these other issues, we see lower disease rates and a lower mortality rate at BMIs in the 18.5 to 22 range, depending on the study & how they grouped the subjects
In the following study, we see that a BMI between 18.5 and 22 may be best for lowering the risk of disease.
"Impact of Overweight on the Risk of Developing Common Chronic Diseases During a 10-Year Period Arch Intern Med. 2001;161:1581-1586
Conclusions: During 10 years of follow-up, the incidence of diabetes, gallstones, hypertension, heart disease, colon cancer, and stroke (men only) increased with degree of overweight in both men and women. Adults who were overweight but not obese (ie, BMI 25.0 to BMI 29.9) were at significantly increased risk of developing numerous health conditions. Moreover, the dose-response relationship between BMI and the risk of developing chronic diseases was evident even among adults in the upper half of the healthy weight range (ie, BMI of 22.0-24.9), suggesting that adults should try to maintain a BMI between 18.5 and 21.9 to minimize their risk of disease.
The above recommendations are especially important as they come from a ten-year follow-up (1986-1996) of middle-aged women in the Nurses' Health Study and men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, two very large and respected epidemiological studies.
This large 5 year study found similar results:
Ajani UA, Lotufo PA, Gaziano JM, Lee IM, Spelsberg A, Buring JE, Willett WC, Manson JE. Body mass index and mortality among US male physicians. Ann Epidemiol. 2004 Nov;14(10):731-739. PMID: 15519894
We analyzed the association between body mass index (BMI) and both all-cause and cause-specific mortality among 85,078 men aged 40 to 84 years from the Physicians' Health Study enrollment cohort.
Among never smokers, in multivariate analyses adjusted for age, alcohol intake, and physical activity, the relative risks of all-cause mortality increased in a stepwise fashion with increasing BMI
Higher levels of BMI were also strongly related to increased risk of cardiovascular mortality, regardless of physical activity level (P for trend, <0.01). CONCLUSIONS: All-cause and cardiovascular mortality was directly related to BMI among middle-aged and elderly men. Advancing age did not attenuate the increased risk of death associated with obesity. Lean men (BMI<20) did not have excess mortality, regardless of age.
We also see similar recommendatons from the following study...
Pinel JP, Assanand S, Lehman DR. Hunger, eating, and ill health. Am Psychol. 2000 Oct;55(10):1105-16. PMID: 11080830
"Most notably, the results revealed a positive correlation between body-mass index and mortality, with the lowest mortality rate occurring among those nurses with body-mass indices below 19-that is, among those nurses weighing at least 15% below the average weight of U.S. women of a similar age and at least 10% below their recommended weights according to the widely used Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Table of 1983. Furthermore, negative correlations were observed between body-mass index and various measures of health: Diabetes, gall stones, hypertension, and nonfatal myocardial infarction were all less frequent in the leanest nurses than in the normal-weight or overweight nurses. Apparently, the various health advantages of a low body-mass index had not been detected in previous studies (e.g., Tuomilehto et al., 1987) because they had not controlled for cigarette smoking."
A twenty year prospective study found that Average-adulthood BMI appears to be an appropriate predictor of mortality risk, provided baseline BMI is used as a covariate. Among non-elderly persons, being leaner meant a lower mortality risk, down to the lowest category of leanness in the study: [BMI < 20].
