Possibly your definition of 'normal' needs recalibration?
On that study about Slightly Overweight is Healthy, doesn't this rather suggest that the current definition of 'healthy' weight needs to be reassessed? rather than that 'overweight is healthy'?
I was already aware that for ladies of my time of life being somewhat over rather than under the recommended BMI is considered desirable.
There's a whole concatenation of moral and aesthetic issues around weight under the heading of 'it's about HEALTH!!!', that suggests to me that Alex Comfort's The Anxiety Makers (1967) could profitably be read about how certain bodily phenomena (his case studies are masturbation panic and constipation) get over-invested with cultural meaning far beyond any actual relationship (if any at all) to well-being.
While the wisdom of our ancestors did, indeed, includes 'wanking is bad for you!' and 'clear out the sewers of the body!' one does feel that they had a point in thinking that a certain degree of plumpness was not a bad thing, though one would not go as far as believing that the Weir Mitchell treatment as imposed on Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Virginia Woolf was a Good Thing. But this is surely better than parents who are so worried about really small children getting OMG FAT!!! that they put them on dangerous diets.
On the Wisdom of Our Ancestors and perceived risk, I think this piece is also relevant:
Norovirus deserves our respect. In the wealthy world, a blase attitude to infectious disesase has taken hold. We need to be more wary.
In my young day, there were designated periods of quarantine for infectious diseases, and so one was moping about, bored to distraction, at home because one was, essentially, better, but not allowed to go back to school.
Though I am also given to suspect that coffee-shop baristas struggle back from a bout of norovirus because, no sick pay, and if they miss too many days they get sacked. Or at least, they need the money coming in.
Bring back the Medical Officer of Health, I say.
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