Fat people live longer than their skinny counterparts because their brains get more nourishment under stress, a German obesity expert has claimed. Achim Peters says that overweight people are more suited to the stresses of modern life because their metabolisms are better able to deal with it.

Professor Peters, of Luebeck University in northern Germany and author of the book “Overweight Myths - Why Fat People Live Longer” has been studying the brain and weight related issues for three decades.

He said, “People react to stressful, uncertain circumstances in two ways. Some eat and become fat. Others refuse food and become thin. The ones who become really ill are the thin ones. The fat ones are, in comparison with the thin ones, much healthier.”

He added that being thin in itself is not a problem, but those who lose weight when under stress are in danger.

“We have to worry much more about the thin stressed people than about the fat stressed people. Yet they are not regarded widely as having a problem precisely because they are thin. But in fact they die earliest.”

Professor Peters told a German newspaper that he and his colleagues studied “toxic stresses brought on by factors outside of an individual's control, such as poverty, bullying, abuse, divorce, low self-esteem and trouble in the workplace.”

People who don't eat when they're stressed are in danger, as their brain gets nutrients from the muscles and organs, rather than food.

Individuals who pile on the pounds under such circumstance get the nutrients they need to feed their brains.

“When the brain doesn't get them from external sources, it gets them from within - from muscles and even worse, from the organs. Thin stressed people are the least healthy people.”

Source: Korea Times