Is it actually healthier to be fat?

A metastudy released new year’s day finds that while being obese is still associated with an increased risk of death, merely being overweight appears to reduce your likelihood of death. In this article, there is a lot of speculation about what is going on here. It goes against what the doctors thought they knew.

What do you think of this? Is this good news? Maybe we don’t have to diet so hard, any more. As long as we aren’t obese, we’re ok. Maybe even better off than those people who think they are healthy by staying at such a thin weight. Or is this another study that will be overturned one day? Could this change our attitude about overweight people?