Overweight, Obesity, and All-Cause Mortality

Dr Flegal and colleagues1 concluded that grade 1 obesity was not associated with higher all-cause mortality and that overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality. Other studies have shown that obesity in different populations, such as elderly people and patients with cardiovascular diseases, is also paradoxically not associated with a higher but rather with a lower mortality risk.2 This has been termed the obesity paradox