Fat is good! (or at least, better than liver failure)

[reinhard]

From a recent NY Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/scien ... ref=slogin

It’s easy to fear and despise our body fat and to see it as an unnatural, inert, pointless counterpoint to all things phat and fabulous. Yet fat tissue is not the problem here, and to castigate fat for getting too big and to blame it for high blood pressure or a wheezing heart is like a heavy drinker blaming the liver for turning cirrhotic. Just as the lush’s liver was merely doing its hepatic best to detoxify the large quantities of liquor in which it was doused, and just as the alcoholic would have been far worse off had the liver not been playing Hepa-filter in the first place, so our fat tissue, by efficiently absorbing the excess packets of energy we put in our mouths, has our best interests at heart.

“Obesity is not due to any defect in adipose tissue per se; it’s an issue of energy balance,†said Bruce M. Spiegelman of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. If you are consuming too many calories relative to what you burn off, the body must cope with that energy surplus, he said, “and adipose tissue is the proper place for it.â€

“If you had no fat cells, no adipose tissue, you’d still be out of energy balance, and you’d put the excess energy somewhere else,†he said, at which point really bad things can happen. Consider the lipodystrophy diseases, rare metabolic disorders in which the body lacks fat tissue and instead dumps its energy overruns in that jack-of-all-organs, the liver, causing extreme liver swelling, liver failure and sometimes liver-bearer death.

“Some adipose tissue is a good thing,†said Barbara Kahn, chief of the endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, at Harvard.

[NoelFigart]

Yes, some body fat is indeed necessary.

I find it frustrating when people don't realize that a size zero (unless you're a size zero at ~18% body fat, which is unlikely in the extreme) is as unhealthy as a size 24 (unless you're a size 24 at somewhere around 24% body fat, which is unlikely in the extreme).

People are losing sight of the happy medium that really is the healthy place to be.

Ferinstance, in a woman, a healthy body fat percentage is between 18% and 24%. I have a lean body mass of around 119lbs, so I can weigh between 140 and 147 and be just fine. (MY LBM is quite high for a woman. I lift weights).

At those weights, I will most emphatically NOT look like a figure competitor! They diet down to more like 10-12% body fat for competitions. No thanks. Dieting down to that is even less fun than it sounds like!