A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down' - but not as we might imagine!

The starting place to understand the relationship between sugar and medicine is obesity. What precisely is obesity? It certainly means to be 'grossly' overweight, because of an excess of body fat. But how do we know if we or someone else fits the definition of obesity? Just looking at oneself or someone else is one way to verify obesity. But it's the body mass index that defines the clinical obesity recognized by the health professions and insurance industry. The body mass index or BMI standardizes measurement of body-fat health-effects in relation to height and weight.