BEATRICE Ferg- uson, daughter of "Fergie" (the Duchess of York), might be part of the British royal family, but that doesn't keep the press from chastising her for her weight. She is a "regular size 10" and "fit and healthy," objects her mum--but still some cad from The Daily Mail went so far as to call her a "pampered Miss Piggy."

The Daily Mail is obviously out of touch--or hasn't read the August 2008 edition of the Archives of Internal Medicine, in which there are two papers documenting the state of being "obese without cardiometabolic risk factors."

In other words, being fat isn't necessarily unhealthy.

Now before you reach for Rocky Road Häagen-Dazs or Death by Chocolate Black Forest cake, let me qualify that a bit. We are talking overweight and mild obesity--not severe or morbid obesity (see my explanation of the different categories on Page E3).

But the main thrust of the articles is that there are other cardiometabolic factors that seem to determine whether you are predisposed to blockage of the arteries--with its consequences of stroke, heart attack, etc.

It's not necessarily being fat that matters.

METABOLIC MARKERS

The authors of one study noted that "a considerable proportion of overweight and obese U.S. adults are metabolically healthy, whereas a considerable portion of normal-weight adults express a clustering of cardiometabolic abnormalities."

In other words, you can be overweight and healthy, and you can be normal weight and unhealthy--if you have these particular risk factors.

The risk factors include high blood pressure, low levels of HDL (good) cholesterol, high levels of triglycerides, and, seemingly most important of all, whether you have insulin resistance. Insulin resistance means the cells in your body do not metabolize glucose in the normal way, in response to insulin.

These sinister metabolic markers are correlated with where the fat in your body is distributed--a pear-shaped body is good, and apple shape is bad. A very simple way to get some idea about this is to measure your waist circumference (see box at right for details).

EXERCISE, EXERCISE

To some extent, these cardiometabolic factors are determined by your inheritance, and there's not a lot you can do about that. But what you can do that makes a whole lot of difference is exercise, exercise, exercise!