Metabolic Healthy Obesity-A Paradoxical Fallacy?

In the era of modern medicine, obesity has become the most catastrophic non communicable burden. It is pandemic and is the root of all non communicable disease risks. Again to make things more complicated, it shows great variability in different races as far as pin pointing the cut-off for its appropriate definition. Body Mass Index (BMI) is still followed as a sole parameter for its definition, though; it has failed to mathematically show its correlation with the consequences of obesity related complications. Other terminologies like, Metabolic Healthy Obesity (MHO), Metabolic Obesity Normal Weight (MONW) is now in use still complicating the current burden of risk stratification. It is this “MHO” subgroup that has created lot of debate, just because two paradoxical words (“healthy” and “obesity”) are simultaneously associated, meaning that sometimes obesity can be healthy. Initially some researchers concluded the same, but new researchers are coming forward with convincing results that actually MHO is not healthy at all. This review tries to summarise the basic concepts of MHO and the current scenario of MHO research as far as development of cardiovascular risks is concerned in this so called subgroup of population.