There are overweight people without who are not sick
Weight gain occurs after metabolic syndrome, but there are also 20 percent of people who are overweight but not sick. Because the subcutaneous fat tissue can actually be protective, giving excess energy a nontoxic place to go. Just because they’re obese does not automatically mean that they harbor the egregious and deadly forms of fat in other organs where it shouldn’t be. Rather, it’s the ectopic fat that determines if they’ll develop diabetes or heart disease. Robert H. Lustig and colleuges have shown that fat in the liver is the most predictive of whether someone will get diabetes in the future. Furthermore, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease can lead to cirrhosis (scarring of the liver, which is lethal), just as can happen in chronic alcoholics. Each of these conditions occurs in normal weight people, too! Obesity is just another symptom of the problem (Insulin resistance), not the problem itself. But modern medicine tends to target the pathology of an illness rather than preventing it.
References
- Lustig, Robert. (2021). Metabolical Chapter 2. “Modern Medicine” Treats Symptoms, Not Disease (p. 41). New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.