This article first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
With the help of a small stool, Mercy Carrion clambers onto an examination table. The obese 50-year-old woman stands just 115.6 cm (3 feet, 9.5 inches) tall. Despite being overweight, Mercy shows no sign of developing diabetes and has remarkably low blood pressure at 100/70. “That’s why they don’t care much about their weight,” says her doctor, Jaime Guevara-Aguirre.
