The research found that the paradox was due to the use of BMI as a metric to define who is obese.
A new study published in the European Heart Journal debunked the “obesity paradox” — the idea that people who are overweight or obese have a more likely to survive after suffering heart failure.
Many of the previous studies that pointed to this phenomenon used the body mass index as the indicator that determined if someone was overweight. This correlation is counterintuitivesince obesity increases the probability of having heart problems, therefore it does not make sense that being overweight is associated with a higher survival rate.
In this research, the investigators used the ratio between the measurements of the waist and hips and found that this correlation disappeared, which casts even more doubt on the reliability of BMI as a medical metric.
“It has been suggested that living with obesity is good for patients with heart failure. We knew this couldn’t be right and that obesity must be bad, not good. We felt that part of the problem was that the BMI was a poor indicator how much adipose tissue a patient had,” says John McMurray, lead author of the study.
Scientists recruited 1832 women and 6567 men who were hospitalized with heart failure and analyzed their BMI, again finding that patients with a higher BMI recovered better after hospitalization.
The authors then adjusted these results with different measures, mainly waist-to-hip ratio, waist circumference and other bioindicators such as natriuretic peptideswhich are considered the best markers of heart failure, reports the IFLScience.
When these factors were taken into account, the paradoxical correlation disappeared. Scientists have noted, however, a strong correlation between high BMI, high waist-to-height ratio and the onset of heart failure.
The results indicate that the BMI is not a reliable indicator of obesity-related health risks, and scientists should explore other metrics as alternatives.
ZAP // 
