In findings contradicting the “obesity paradox”, which had suggested a possible survival advantage to being overweight, researchers said excess body weight now causes 1 in 5 of all premature deaths in America and 1 in 7 in Europe. A combined 1.6 million deaths were recorded across these studies, in which participants were followed for an average of 14 years.
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Why obese men are at greater risk for premature death than women isn’t clear.
They looked at body mass index (BMI) – an indicator of body fat calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by their height in meters squared (kg/m2).
Using data from nearly four million adults on four continents, the study in The Lancet medical journal found that overweight people lost about a year of life expectancy on average, and “moderately obese” people about three years.
The team argued that if people with overweight or obesity achieve standard BMI levels, the probability of premature death would decrease one in five in North America, one in seven in Europe, one in 20 in East Asia and one in six in Australia and New Zealand.
While unchanged in recent years, the NIH report found that are still rising long term; 19% of children age 6 to 17 years were obese from 2011-2014.
“We still have more work to do to better understand how weight, weight gain, and weight loss influence mortality”, said Barry Graubard, a senior investigator in the biostatistics branch of the U.S. National Cancer Institute.
The risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease and cancer “are all increased”, he said.
As per lead author Emanuele Di Angelantonio from the University of Cambridge obesity is associated with an unequivocal risk of premature death.
This study also indicates that the risk extends across the full range of overweight and obesity – the more severe the obesity, the graver the danger, he added.
The study also found that being obese is far more unsafe for men than for women.
Overall the association with premature death before the age of 70 was three times stronger for overweight and obese men than for women.
Obesity is on the rise in the United States and around the world, with the World Health Organization estimating that 1.3 billion adults are at least overweight, making it second only to smoking as a culprit in early death, according to a study co-author. “What we already had abundant cause to think, this paper gives us ample cause to know, that risk includes early death”.
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.
To rule out the impact of other mortality risks, the team excluded current or former smokers, those who had chronic disease at the beginning of the study, and those who died within the first five years – and were left with a sample group of 3.9 million adults. “Smoking causes about a quarter of all premature deaths in Europe and in North America, and smokers can halve their risk of premature death by stopping”. They say: “Challenges in deriving global public health recommendations are unlikely to be resolved by ever larger datasets without further developments in study data and design”.
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In the new study, researchers collected data on 3.9 million adults, aged 20 to 90.
