New research has come up with some surprising revelations about people who are overweight.
The research by scientists from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, has found that it may be possible to be both fat and healthy.
The researchers say at least half of overweight adults, and almost a third of obese men and women, have normal blood pressure, cholesterol and other measures of heart health.
They say being lean does not necessarily protect people as almost a quarter of normal-weight adults in the U.S. were found in one study to have risk factors for heart disease or diabetes.
The researchers suggest that not enough is known about obesity as a considerable proportion of overweight and obese U.S. adults are metabolically healthy, whereas a considerable proportion of normal-weight adults have a number of cardiometabolic abnormalities.
Researchers Rachel Wildman and Judith Wylie-Rosett who led the study, say their research shows you can still be healthy even if you are obese.
The team of researchers examined data on 5,440 men and women who were examined and filled out questionnaires for the National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys between 1999 and 2004, the majority did little exercise.
The data revealed that just over 51 percent of those who were overweight, and 31.7 percent of those who were obese, had healthy levels of cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure and other measures linked to heart disease, strokes, diabetes and other heart disease.
It also revealed that more than 23 percent of those who were at a healthy weight, according to their body mass index, had two or more unhealthy readings.
While people's diets came under scrutiny the researchers believe the critical factor may be the location of the body fat, which might be as important as how much of it there is.
There is an abundance of research which has demonstrated that having visceral fat, in and among the internal organs, may be more dangerous than having fat on the thighs or buttocks.
The most common way to estimate visceral fat, is by measuring the waist circumference, and it was found that more than 36 percent of the obese people with what should have been dangerously large waists, had healthy blood test results.
The research is published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.