It has been a long standing misconception that obese people ‘can’t be malnourished’ because they are overweight. However, if we look at what malnourished actually means, it can of course apply to both overweight and underweight people. Malnourished is the term given to someone who isn’t getting the vitamins and minerals they need through their diet resulting in a failure to develop properly or function normally! With this is mind then, it is absolutely feasible for a person to pump themselves full of high calorie food that has very low nutritional value, the consequence of which… is malnutrition!
Either underweight or obese people are at risk of malnutrition through poor food choices, but obese individuals can go unnoticed because of their ‘apparent’ wellbeing due to their size, when in fact it’s quite the contrary! Eating calorie dense foods with little or no nutritional value will serve no other purpose than weight gain, so an obese persons nutritional adequacy should be watched as closely as an underweight individuals.
Daily Mail, (2014). Obese people are actually MALNOURISHED because they eat such poor quality food, says weight-loss surgeon. Retrieved 6th November, 2014, from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2823213/Obese-people-actually-MALNOURISHED-eat-poor-quality-food-says-NHS-weight-loss-surgeon.html