Why pandemic kilos are not as bad as you think

Is carrying a few extra kilos necessarily all that bad? The scientific evidence says not.

With sourdough baking sprees and constant access to the fridge during confinement at home, we ate more, with comfort food high on the list.

If you’re like many of us, you may have put on weight over the pandemic. Lockdowns resulted in a drop in physical activity for many people, especially incidental exercise, and with sourdough baking sprees and constant access to the fridge during confinement at home, we ate more, with comfort food high on the list.

But is carrying a few extra kilos necessarily all that bad? The scientific evidence says not. Contrary to the dominant health messaging that having a BMI under 25 is optimal for health, there’s growing evidence that having a BMI that puts you in the overweight category actually stands you in better stead for living a longer life and recovering more easily from health crises including heart attacks, stroke and cancer. Data linking a lower BMI with a lower risk of major diseases is at least 50 years old, and health advice hasn’t kept pace with improving nutrition and healthcare. Plus the magic number of 25 which is the upper limit of the healthy weight category was actually revised downwards from 27.8 for men and 27.3 for women by the US National Institute of Health several years ago, for dubious reasons.

“As we’ve been better at collecting data, and at analysing it, and gotten better at doing health care over the last few decades, the nadir of that curve for BMI now falls in the range between a BMI of 25 and 30, which is currently labelled as overweight,” says dietitian Fiona Willer, who has a doctorate in weight-neutral approaches to dietetics.

“If you were to get cancer and your BMI is between 25 and 30, your outcomes would be better than if you had a lower BMI. Similarly, if you survive a heart attack it’s much better to be a little heavier than lighter. In almost all domains, if somebody lives in a developed nation, and they’re within the 25 to 30 BMI category, they’re going to have better outcomes than someone with a lower BMI.”

The first researcher to explode the myth that a BMI under 25 was optimal was a US Center for Disease Control senior scientist, Katherine Flegal. Dr Flegal found that the BMI associated with the lowest risk of disease had crept up steadily since the 1970s. In the 1970s, it was 23.5 for those who were 60 and younger and 24.4 for those who were older than 60. From 2003 to 2013, the BMI linked to the lowest mortality was 26.7 for those 60 and younger and 27.3 for those over 60, which is at the lower end of the overweight category.

Flegal’s research found that even when adjusting for smoking, age, and sex, overweight people – those with a body mass index of between 25 and 30 – had a 6 per cent lower risk of dying than normal-weight individuals. The research also suggested slightly overweight individuals recovered better from ailments including pneumonia, burns, stroke, cancer, hypertension, and heart disease.

Other researchers have found that Health at Every Size, when compared with a weight-loss approach, leads to lower cholesterol, blood pressure, and other metabolic markers.

So why the surprising findings?

“From a dietetic standpoint, if you are slightly overweight, the body has a reserve to draw on to help it recover,” Dr Willer says. “The body doesn’t actually know what BMI is, that’s a wholly human kind of assessment method. All the body knows is what it has to work with when faced with biological challenges. And so for the health issues that strike people down, having extra energy and nutrients available is really important for healing and recovery.”

The other critical message when considering BMI is it’s much more important to be fit than to be skinny. Muscle weighs more than fat, so some extremely fit individuals actually fall into the overweight category according to BMI, which is a fallacy.

So if you’re feeling bad about your pandemic pounds, it might be worth relaxing. They may just help you live longer.