Health experts around the world have said there needs to be a "more accurate" and nuanced definition of obesity as there is a risk of too many people being diagnosed as obese.
In a report published on Tuesday (January 14), The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology Commission said that despite evidence that some people with excess adiposity have ill health due to obesity, "obesity is generally considered a harbinger of other diseases, not a disease in itself."
"The idea of obesity as a disease remains therefore highly controversial," the report said.
The current definition of obesity
A recent report by BBC said that in many countries, obesity is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) over 30. The report said that access to weight-loss drugs is often restricted to patients in this category.
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The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology Commission said that BMI reveals nothing about a patient's overall health and fails to distinguish between muscle and body fat or account for the more dangerous fat around the waist and organs.
What do experts suggest?
Global health experts suggested that doctors should consider the overall health of patients with excess fat, rather than just measuring their body mass index (BMI).
"In addition, current BMI-based measures of obesity can both underestimate and overestimate adiposity and provide inadequate information about health at the individual level," the report highlighted.
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The commission defined obesity as a condition characterised by excess adiposity, with or without abnormal distribution or function of adipose tissue, and with causes that are multifactorial and still incompletely understood.
Clinical obesity and pre-clinical obesity
The commission also defined two kinds of obesity- clinical obesity and pre-clinical obesity.
Clinical obesity: The commission defined this obesity as a chronic, systemic illness characterised by alterations in the function of tissues, organs, the entire individual, or a combination thereof, due to excess adiposity.
Clinical obesity can lead to severe end-organ damage, causing life-altering and potentially life-threatening complications such as heart attack, stroke, and renal failure.
Pre-clinical obesity: The commission said that pre-clinical obesity is a state of excess adiposity with preserved function of other tissues and organs and a varying, but generally increased, risk of developing clinical obesity and several other non-communicable diseases including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain types of cancer.
Click here to access the commission's report
"Although the risk of mortality and obesity-associated diseases can rise as a continuum across increasing levels of fat mass, we differentiate between preclinical and clinical obesity (ie, health vs illness) for clinical and policy-related purposes," the commission said.
It also recommended that BMI should be used only as a surrogate measure of health risk at a population level, for epidemiological studies, or for screening purposes, rather than as an individual measure of health.
(With inputs from agencies)