What physicians get wrong about the risks of being overweight

Based on cues she’d picked up from popular culture and public health guidance, Stanford Medicine statistician Maya Mathur, Ph.D., had always assumed that being overweight decreases lifespans. She was surprised, then, to come across research that suggested the life expectancy among overweight people—those with a body mass index between 25 and 29.9—wasn’t generally shorter than for people in the normal BMI range, controlling for factors such as age and whether they smoked.