FRACTIONATING HEALTHY WEIGHT

Any discussion of healthy weight necessarily starts with body composit ion and its relation to long-term mortality and morbidity and then goe s on to consider the limited range of ages for which we have epidemiol ogic data, the time span involved, the criteria used to define ''healt hy,'' and the possibility that a weight that is advantageous with resp ect to one outcome criterion may be disadvantageous for another. One m ay therefore ask, weight of what? healthy weight for whom? by what cri teria? and question whether a simple weight-for-height ratio is suffic iently effective for the task.