Interesting article at Wired ("How Does Fat Kill Thee? Many Ways") discussing new correlations between excess body fat and general health issues.

"A series of recent discoveries suggests that all fat-storage cells churn out a stew of hormones and other chemical messengers that fine-tune the body's energy balance. But when spewed in vast amounts by cells swollen to capacity with fat, they assault many organs in ways that are bad for health.

The exact details are still being worked out, but scientists say there is no doubt this flux of biological cross talk hastens death from heart disease, strokes, diabetes and cancer, diseases that are especially common among the obese.

'When we look at fat tissue now, we see it's not just a passive depot of fat,' says Dr. Rudolph Leibel of Columbia University. 'It's an active manufacturer of signals to other parts of the body.'"