Hi everyone I'm Monica Reinagel. Welcome back to the nutrition divas quick and dirty

tips for eating well and feeling fabulous. Today we're talking about your body mass index or BMI and what it does and

doesn't say about your health. There's been a lot of buzz lately over a new study which seems to suggest that people who are overweight, but not obese, may actually have a higher life expectancy than those who are considered normal or healthy weight.

In this analysis, researchers categorized people as normal weight, overweight, or obese, using

their body mass index or BMI, a number that takes into consideration your weight and your height.

So many people chalked these surprising results up to the limitations of the BMI as an indicator.

You see, the BMI doesn't account for body composition,

that is the relative proportion of fat and muscle tissue.

And people often point out that a bodybuilder who has lots of muscle and very little

fat could easily have a BMI in the obese category, even though they're clearly not obese. But let's be honest, bodybuilders account for an extremely small fraction of the general population.

And as a simple tool for assessing the general population, the BMI is actually fairly reliable.

Others took these results to mean that being overweight simply isn't as dangerous to your health as everyone

claims.

I even saw some bloggers suggest that the obesity epidemic

is simply a hoax dreamed up by the dieting industry to sell books and weight loss drugs.

I think that's a rather silly not to mention dangerous position. In this latest

analysis people who were obese had the highest risk of death but people who were

in that overweight category actually had a lower risk of death than those who fell into the normal BMI category.

That may seem surprising, until you consider the fact that the study lumped together people of all ages and in all states of health.

In a general population like this one, many people will end up dying of cancer, which is the second leading cause of death in most

Western countries. Although obesity can increase your risk of getting cancer,

people who are sick with cancer almost always lose a great deal of their body mass.

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