Obesity is not always a disease and BMI is not enough to assess it, estimate around fifty researchers

A commission of international experts underlines, in a scientific journal, that obese people do not necessarily present health problems linked to their weight. The latter also invite the use of tools other than the body mass index.

Is an obese person necessarily a sick person? The question, at the intersection of medical issues and the fight against discrimination, recurrently divides health professionals and civil society. Around fifty obesity specialists have just agreed to redefine this condition which affects one in eight people in the world, and the way to measure it, in an article published Tuesday January 14 in the Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology.

“Although there is evidence that some people with excess fat suffer from poor health due to obesity, obesity is generally considered a harbinger of other diseases, not a disease in itself. The idea that obesity is a disease therefore remains very controversial.underlines the document. Obesity is in fact associated with risks of developing pathologies, such as diabetes or cardiovascular diseases. But these do not occur in all obese people.

Even if a person is declared obese, these experts do not necessarily judge that this should be seen as an illness. According to them, it is only if organs show signs of dysfunction that obesity becomes “clinique”. Without this, they call for talking about obesity “pre-clinical”. It would then not be a disease, but a condition which essentially requires preventive measures, and not necessarily medicinal or surgical treatments, in order to avoid a “overmedicalization”.

The article also emphasizes that the body mass index (BMI), which is based on a ratio between weight and height, is insufficient to determine whether or not a patient is obese. It should be supplemented by other examinations such as measuring waist circumference or estimating the quantity of fat in the body using radiology techniques.