A new far-reaching study found that health risks don’t just begin when you’re obese – they start as soon as you’re medically considered overweight.
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Doctors have warned for years that obesity can have unhealthy consequences, increasing the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and some types of cancer.
In a study of almost 4 million men and women around the globe, the risk of dying before the age of 70 was 19 percent for men and 11 percent for women of normal weight.
Dr Emanuele Di Angelantonio, lead author, said they also found that men who were obese were at much higher risk of premature death than obese women.
Further, an increased risk of premature death was also found for people who were underweight. In other words, risk of dying before the age of 70 elevated by 11% for men and by 4% for women. The risk of developing a clot-related stroke in early adult life increased by 26 percent in women and 21 percent in men for each unit of increase in being overweight at all stages of childhood, but especially at age 13.
Obesity crisis has reached to such stage that it is now considered second to smoking as a cause of premature death in North America and Europe.
Being overweight or obese may be associated with an increased risk of premature death, with the greatest effect in men, according to a new study.
Researchers looked at body mass index (BMI), which is calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by their height in metres squared.
In America, 1 in 5 premature deaths is connected to extra body weight.
Overall, 189 studies were analysed by the Global BMI Mortality Collaboration.
Nearly 4 million adults were surveyed, including Australians and New Zealanders, to determine the link between the Body-Mass Index (BMI) and mortality.
According to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, more than 1.3 bilion adults are overweight, defined as a BMI of 25.0 to 30.0, while an additional 600 million are obese, defined as a BMI of 30.0 or greater.
“If you’re obese when you’re young, you’re likely to have many more years lost than if you’re obese when you’re old”, he said, adding that people over 65 years could be overweight and have “no risk at all of premature death”.
To avoid the impact of other mortality causes in the findings, researchers did not include former or current smokers in the samples, as well as those having a chronic disease at the beginning of the study, and those who died within the first five years. This risk increased to 30% and 15% in respective genders for those who were obese.
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The academics also said the research refuted the ‘obesity paradox’ in which recent studies had suggested that fat could be protective in some instances. The biggest way to keep from becoming a statistic in the death rates of obesity is to simply have some willpower. While we know that these lifestyle diseases shorten lives, what we didn’t know was how much is obesity alone responsible for shortening life span.
