One of my favourite contrarian positions is that being overweight is not so bad. I don't truly believe this but I like to use it to point out that although most everyone holds that being obese is not healthy, there is actually very little evidence to support this assertion. However, this recent rather impressive paper in the Lancet finally shows that being overweight or obese is really bad. The paper is a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies with a combined study size of over 10 million! The take home message is that the hazard ratio for dying is significantly greater than one but not too bad for overweight and mildly obese people (BMI < 30) but increases sharply after that. It is over two and rapidly increasing for BMI greater than 35. The hazard ratio gives the relative probability of mortality (or any outcome) per unit time (i.e. mortality rate) in a survival analysis, which in this case was a Cox proportional hazards model. The hazard ratio as a function of BMI is well fit by a quadratic function with a minimum around 22 kg/m^2. The chances of dying increase if you are thinner or fatter than this. The study was careful to not include smokers and anyone with a chronic disease and also did not start the analysis until 5 years after the measurement to avoid capturing people who are thin because they are already ill. They also broke the model down into various regions. Surprisingly, the chances of dying when you are obese is worse if you are in Europe or North America compared to Asia. Particularly surprising is the fact that the hazard ratio rises slowest in South Asia for increasing BMI. South Asians have been found to be more susceptible to insulin resistance and Type II diabetes with increased body fat but it seems that they die from it at lower rates. However, the error bars were also very large because the sample size was smaller so this may not hold up with more data. In any case, I can no longer use the lack of health consequences of obesity to rib my colleagues so I'll have to find a new axe to grind.