Higher BMI generally means more body fat, and body fatness directly affects levels of serum concentrations of some hormones such as oestrogens, insulin, and insulin-like growth factors, which may facilitate breast carcinogenesis (Key et al, 2003).
What is lost in that is that fitness is almost certainly more important than fatness.
Improved fitness, even more than reduced fatness, attenuated the association of type 2 diabetes with HRQOL.
These associations of HRQOL with type 2 diabetes were attenuated by higher fitness, even more than reduced fatness.
Improved fitness, even more than reduced fatness, was associated with improved HRQOL in people with type 2 diabetes.
A recent prospective study from United States [ 33] showed that cardiorespiratory fitness is more important than fatness in reducing depressive symptoms.
Burkhauser and Cawley ([2008]) recommend using more accurate measures of fatness such as total body fat, percentage body fat, fat-free mass, and waist circumference, and they present a method for adjusting self-reported height and weight using U data.
Interestingly, maximum body fat levels were less good predictors of lifespan, suggesting that early increases in body fat are more deleterious than the maximum fatness reached in life.
But after age 3, fatness was more likely to persist.
Second, a new finding from this study was that higher levels of fitness, more so than lower fatness, attenuated much of the association of HRQOL with type 2 diabetes in most of these physical health domains.
