Fat-but-fit is a couch potato pipe dream after all, Swedish scientists have declared.
Swedish researchers blasted a US study which found that overweight American men — who still manage to do regular aerobic exercise — don’t die any earlier than their couch potato counterparts.
The Swede scientists studied 1.3 million men for 29 years and found that fat men who engage in high levels of aerobic activity are 30 percent more likely to die prematurely, compared to slim non-exercising men, according to Peter Nordstrom from Umea University.
Men at lower levels of BMI (body mass index) stand the best chance of living long, Nordstrom said.
“Furthermore, the risk of early death was higher in fit obese individuals than unfit normal weight individuals,” Nordstrom wrote in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
These new findings contradict a celebrated 2012 study by researchers at the University of South Carolina which looked at scale-tipping men between 1979 and 2003.
The USC scientists found that levels of physical activity were much more important than actual weight, in determining risks for early death.
Tam Fry, a rep for the National Obesity Forum in London, struck a middle ground for the competing findings and said both fitness and weight are important.
“Fatness and inactivity are separate but related risk factors, which both increase mortality,” Fry told the Telegraph newspaper. “So to have one or the other is always bad but to have both is critical.”