"Our study shows you can still be healthy even if you are obese," Wylie-Rosett said.
Her team did not look at people's diets, but she believes the location of body fat is as important as how much there is. Many studies have shown that having visceral fat, in and among the internal organs, may be more dangerous than having fat thighs or buttocks.
But when Wylie-Rosett's team measured waist circumference, a common way to estimate visceral fat, more than 36 percent of the obese people with what should have been dangerously large waists had healthy blood test results.
A second study suggested that the liver may be the key.
Dr. Norbert Stefan and colleagues at the University of Tubingen in Germany closely examined 314 people, using magnetic resonance imaging to look at precisely how much body fat they had and where it was.
They also found that obese men and women could have healthy hearts and arteries and suggested that having fat on the liver may be what makes the difference.
"Altogether, 10 percent of the study population and 25 percent of the obese subjects had a high insulin sensitivity phenotype or 'metabolically benign obesity,"' they wrote in their Archives report.
"Our data suggest that ectopic fat accumulation in the liver may be more important than visceral fat in the determination of such a beneficial phenotype in obesity," they wrote.
"That's an area that we are very intrigued with as well," Wylie-Rosett said," adding: "If you start stuffing people with calories, it is very much like making pate from goose liver."
Geese are often force-fed to make their livers fatty and thus more suitable for pate-making.
(China Daily August 12, 2008)