Fat is inherently unhealthy for you beyond some low baseline level.
Additional muscle is positive for health, but only up to some reasonable threshold. There is no health benefit to having very high levels of muscle, and in fact it may be negative for your health at extreme levels. E.g. many bodybuilders have trouble breathing, sleep apnea etc.
Both people in the example have 60lbs of fat. 1lb of muscle doesn't cancel out the negative health effect of 1lb of fat
The nasty detail is that some people gain relatively more visceral fat than others. These three fats are correlated, but the correlation isn't the same in every human. Some have better metabolism and don't store as much fat inside as others do.
Looking for some references on these claims, thanks! What you're saying registers as "makes some sense, but where's the evidence?" to me. I'm not seeing the connection where total lbs of fat is inherently worse than higher percentage.
The mean height for men at 20-29 is 69.2" and 80+ is 67.1" (measured in 2015-2018, the last data I've found) [1], which could be interpreted as shorter people having lower risk of all mortality. One could say that people are just getting taller over time and 80+ y.o. were shorter at their 20-29, but we also have the median height for 20-29 fro 1970s, when 2018's 80+ were 20-29 - it's actually 69.7" [2], men in the US are getting shorter over time, so unless people naturally shrink 2" with age the data points to shorter people having lower risk of death.
"People typically lose almost one-half inch (about 1 centimeter) every 10 years after age 40. Height loss is even more rapid after age 70. You may lose a total of 1 to 3 inches (2.5 to 7.5 centimeters) in height as you age."
So people DO in fact tend to lose about 2 inches at age 80 versus their younger selves.
The actual studies [1],[2] that tried to measure this came to very different rates of height loss though: 3.6 cm and 6 cm from 40 to 80 in men. This does not look like a serious fact.
The difference was 3.6cm in the study that measured 10 more years 30-80. And 5cm in the study that measured 10 fewer years 40-80.
The studies were conducted over different time periods when average nutrition changed, and demographics changed. And the study demographics just vary by location.
Height loss with age is incredibly well documented. Here’s a few more studies.
This is just basic medical textbook information. No one in the world is arguing that this phenomenon doesn’t exist.
I am not saying that. I am saying that the theory about absolute amount of fat being bad for health, as stated by the comment you responded, seems to be supported by data.
> I asked about the specific claim that absolute fat was bad for your heart.
There is no word "heart" or any to this effect in the message you replied to so I did not understand that was what you were doing. I took your question as an attempt to attack the theory on the basis of prevalence of some heart conditions in shorter people.
Some are more common in short people and some are more common in tall people. Hypertension is one of the ones more common in short people and is significantly more common than the rest combined, so your overall chance of having some form of heart disease goes down as you get taller. However, the forms of cardiovascular disease more common in tall people (e.g. atrial fibrillation) are more likely to actually kill you.
Additional muscle is positive for health, but only up to some reasonable threshold. There is no health benefit to having very high levels of muscle, and in fact it may be negative for your health at extreme levels. E.g. many bodybuilders have trouble breathing, sleep apnea etc.
Both people in the example have 60lbs of fat. 1lb of muscle doesn't cancel out the negative health effect of 1lb of fat