This story from America’s paper of Record is funny.

With swimsuit season right around the corner, a new science-based, anti-diet book offers the most enabling advice we’ve heard this year: Those thunder thighs you hate so much might be key to long life.

“The Obesity Paradox” presents compelling evidence that those with excess baggage might be healthier and better able to fight off diseases than normal-weight counterparts. Conversely, the “thin and unfit” waifs have the worst body types for long-term health.

Though obesity remains a risk factor of “epidemic portions” — more, some researchers say, than smoking or alcoholism— associated with heart disease, stroke, Type-2 diabetes, and cancer, cardiologist Carl J. Lavie argues that we need to rethink what we call “fat” and what we consider “healthy.”

Lavie, a cardiologist at the John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute in New Orleans sums it up with one phrase in his book: “Looks can be deceiving.”

The idea of thin being beautiful is not universal. American blacks have always preferred big sloppy fat women over “pancake butts.” The older Hindu men in my area love waddling around showing off their big gut. In their culture, a big belly is a sign of success. That and the hip-hop starter kit of gold ropes and chains. Victorians, as best I can tell, were all chubby chasers.

“Obesity paradox,” the term, was coined in 2002 by Dr. Luis Gruberg and colleagues at the Cardiovascular Research Institute in Washington D.C., when they discovered — to their surprise — that overweight and obese patients had roughly half the risk of mortality than normal-weight patients following angioplasty, a procedure to unblock arteries in the heart.

Lavie’s book challenges widely accepted views on obesity and health.

Lavie noticed a similar trend in his patients recovering from heart failure. He published his findings in 2003, where he revealed that for every 1 percent increase in body fat there was a 13 percent increase in overall survival.

“These findings created an uproar among my colleagues,” Lavie writes. “Unfortunately, the science world wasn’t ready to accept this observation in the early 2000s.”

But other studies backed the findings up. Overweight and moderately obese people also had better outcomes with other chronic diseases like kidney failure, advanced cancer, and AIDS.

This should not be shocking. The disconnect between official dogma and observable reality has never been greater in the West. Humans are obviously living longer and living better now than at any other time in human history. We are also at our fattest.

The studies are intriguing — but less clear is why.

Theories abound. For one, fighting off a disease requires using more energy. Patients who have more fat squirreled away might be at a natural advantage to battling chronic diseases.

The science world wasn’t ready to accept this observation.

Then there’s the role of genetics. While an overweight person might develop, say, heart disease because of his weight, a thin person who develops heart disease is more likely to have developed it because of a genetic predisposition. But, he writes, “A thinner person’s prognosis would be worse in comparison to a fatter person’s due to the power of those genetics.”

Of course it is genetics. What’s amazing is there are still people who doubt this.

The obesity paradox, though, has had its fair share of critics. Some argue that these studies fail to take into account smokers, who are more likely to have lower BMIs. Some point out that the most sick tend to be the thinnest.

Lavie retorts that these criticisms don’t explain away the growing body of research that links higher BMIs to increased survival rates. Obesity — defined as having a BMI of 30 or higher — is “a crude way of determining one’s risk factors for obesity related illnesses.”

BMI doesn’t take into account body shape, cardiovascular level, or genetics.

And not all fat is created equal. Instead, unhealthy fat follows the real estate rule of “location, location, location.”

Abdominal fat, for instance, is associated with greater risks for diseases, while fat stored on bottoms, thighs, hips, or upper arms does not carry the same risk factors.

Carrying lower fat might actually help us combat cardiovascular diseases. Fatter thighs are linked to lower risks of metabolic syndrome, a cluster of risk factors that include raised blood pressure and high triglycerides.

The cult of healthy living has been with use for a very long time now. The folks making billions from it will never sign off on the end of their influence. That’s why reform fails everywhere in all things and all places. Reform is just a polite way of saying it is time to scrape the barnacles loose from the ship’s hull. Those barnacles will fight to stick around until the last man. The food police have a good thing going and they are not going to agree with science, if it means they lose their jobs.

Here’s what matters. Humans are wired to eat as much as they can when they can. For 99% of human history, food was scare and the supply was unpredictable. Those who could load up on a kill and weather the long winter were going to survive to spring. Repeat that for 50,000 years and you have a species that will overeat when food is plentiful It’s not that complicated. Europeans are probably more susceptible to this owing to the fact they evolved in much harsher conditions than tribes around the equator.