Fatties Rejoice, Upton is the New Moss

Here’s yet another reason to sock it to those girls at Skinny Gossip: apparently being underweight is much more dangerous than being overweight.

In a recent study at the University Of California Davis School Of Medicine, Professor Anthony Jerant and colleagues surveyed approximately 51,000 Americans across the gamut of demographics over the course of six years, and discovered that individuals with a Body Mass Index (BMI) classification of “underweight” had a mortality rate approximately twice that of those in the “normal” weight class. Those classified as “severely obese,” by contrast, were just 1.26 times at higher risk.

These findings can be attributed to the study’s methodology, through which factors like hypertension and diabetes were considered in some models as separate from obesity, suggesting that those in the “severely obese” category, without hypertension and diabetes, were in fact no more likely to die than their “normal” counterparts. Also unmentioned were the factors causing the underweight to be at such a higher risk.

One suggested point of the study was actually to discredit the BMI system, adopted in the 1800s, as a viable means of measuring someone’s health. So findings that BMI-defined underweighted-ness is more dangerous that BMI-defined obesity might not really mean much of anything at all.

“We hope our findings will trigger studies that re-examine the relationship of being overweight or obese with long-term mortality,” Jerant said in The Register.

For now though, let’s all apologize to Kate Upton and enjoy our Tacones, Bacon Burgers and Deep Fried Sheep Balls in peace.