Why Does a Study Say Overweight People Live Longer?

Do a few extra pounds really add a few extra years of life? Or is something rotten?

God, I could go for five or six of those right now. For my health, of course. Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

Here’s a quick quiz for you. Don’t worry, there’s only one question that you need to answer, and it’s totally hypothetical:

You’re a doctor at a hospital. Two patients are in two private rooms in front of you. You can’t see into the rooms, and you don’t know anything about the patients except that the left patient is overweight, and the right patient is not.

Which patient is more likely to die?

Did you guess that the overweight patient is more likely to die? If so, I’ve got some bad news for you; you’re wrong, according to a 2013 meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

How does this make sense? We’ve always heard about how carrying excess weight is unhealthy. Why is an overweight person less likely to die than someone who is not overweight? Is this shoddy science, or is this study proving that everything we know about health and nutrition is wrong, and we should all be snarfing cheeseburgers for every meal?

What the study says

In 2013, researchers at the National Center for Health Statistics looked at 97 different…