FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: What physicians get wrong about the risks of being overweight. “Based on cues she’d picked up from popular culture and public health guidance, Stanford Medicine statistician Maya Mathur, Ph.D., had always assumed that being overweight decreases lifespans. She was surprised, then, to come across research that suggested the life expectancy among overweight people—those with a body mass index between 25 and 29.9—wasn’t generally shorter than for people in the normal BMI range, controlling for factors such as age and whether they smoked. In fact, a 2013 paper—which analyzed nearly 100 studies that included more than 2.8 million people—found that being overweight slightly reduced mortality risk. (That wasn’t the case for those considered obese, with a BMI at or above 30.)”

More vindication for my grandmother, who said “you need to carry a little more around on you when you get older, in case you get a wasting illness.” Or her grandmother, who talked about “putting on some good, healthy flesh” as you got older.

Generally speaking, this is an era in which grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers are being vindicated a lot. . . .