Empowered Health Course · Lesson 8 · 1:47
Obesity is a real disease — it leads to morbidity and premature death, and that risk rises as body weight and body mass increase. That's the hard truth, and it's very relevant to large populations: if we look at data from a large group, that's what the evidence shows.
But as a clinician working with you one-on-one, we can get into finer detail about your particular risk. Some people with a BMI of 35 may have fairly minor health risks, because of how their fat is stored and their level of fitness. Someone with a BMI of 27 might have significant health risk from just that extra bit of weight. So at the individual level we can think about things quite differently than at the population level — what we call epidemiology.
This transcript has been lightly edited from the video for readability. For the complete experience, please watch the video above.