Advantage of Body Fat

I will tell you, and I do believe, there have been some studies coming out saying that having moderately excess weight may be healthy, especially the older you get. It looks as if the main harm of carrying too much weight correlates with age. The younger you are the more dangerous it is to have excess weight. But as you get into middle age and old age, having moderately excess weight seems to correlate with better longevity and better health. There are two ways in which having excess body fat is useful. The first is that if you get a serious acute infection, particularly one involving the respiratory system such as severe influenza or pneumonia, commonly you see people lose twenty pounds in sometimes 48 hours in response to having a high fever. If you don't have twenty pounds to lose you are dead in that situation. That is one reason there is immediate protection from sudden death from an acute infection. Another long range possibility is that having excess weight protects your brain and central nervous system because there seems to be a correlation between ultra leanness and an increased risk of ALS and other serious neurodegenerative diseases. One possibility here is if this is environmental toxicity of some sort, if there is no body fat to dilute these exposures, it concentrates in the fatty tissue of the central nervous system. I don't know, but this is a correlation that I see, so I would just put it out there that obsession with leanness has gone to an extreme in this culture and I think the media and entertainment industries are very responsible.