The third edition in our collection of Obesity Paradoxes addresses the leading cause of death in the

United States

: heart disease. The CDC reports we’re most likely to die of heart disease than anything else.

But research just published in the American Heart Journal found you are 2 1/2 times less likely to die of acute heart failure if you are obese when you’re hospitalized than if you are “normal weight!”

UCLA researchers analyzed the Acute Decompensated Heart Failure National Registry and the more than 108,000 cases of acute heart failure that had been hospitalized in 263 hospitals across the country from October 2001 through December 2004. Despite adjusting for every contributing factor, age, gender, lab work and other health indice, they found that for every 5 unit increase in body mass index (BMI) the risk of dying dropped by 10 percent.

Actual mortality rates for the “normal” weight patients was 6.3 compared with 2.4 for the most “obese.” This is not a fluke finding, as the researchers specifically note that “prior studies on chronic heart failure have demonstrated that body mass index is inversely associated with mortality, the so-called obesity paradox.”