Why obese men are at greater risk for premature death than women isn’t clear. “But, overweight and obesity now cause about one in seven of all premature deaths in Europe and one in five of all premature deaths in North America”.
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Indeed, the study showed that those having overweight problems are at the risk of dying before turning 70 years old.
Scientists say though the reasons behind the trend are unclear, the study supports others that suggest obese men are at higher risk of diabetes and have higher levels of risky liver fat.
One study, of more than 257,623 people, by Dr. Britt Wang Jensen and colleagues at the Institute of Preventive Medicine, in Bispebjerg, Denmark, and Frederiksberg Hospital in Copenhagen, grouped children according to standard deviations from a mean BMI, adjusted for a child’s age and sex.
The researchers looked at data from nearly 4 million people from 32 countries who were part of the Global BMI Mortality Collaboration.
This corresponds to an absolute increase of 10.5 per cent for men, and 3.6 per cent for women, which is three times as big, as the risk of premature death in men with normal Body Mass Index (BMI) is at 19 per cent and women at 11 per cent.
A study of 3.9 million adults found that those who were moderately obese died three years prematurely on average. Such result is, of course, reversible if obese people achieve weight loss. The risks of coronary heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease and cancer are all increased. The WHO defines BMI 18.5-25 as normal, 25-30 as overweight, 30-35 as moderately obese and over 40 as severely obese.
“If you could lose about 10 percent of your weight, a woman would knock 10 percent off the risk of dying before she was 70, and for a man it would knock about 20 percent off”, Peto said.
“The risk of the message from earlier papers is that being overweight and slightly obese is normal”. The information came from 189 previous studies in Europe, North America and elsewhere.
Co-author Professor Sir Richard Peto, from Oxford University, said: “Obesity is second only to smoking as a cause of premature death in Europe and North America”.
“The results show that being overweight does have a significant impact on your health and strengthen the arguments for public health measures to reduce obesity in our society”.
In 2014, according to the World Health Organization, more than 1.9 million adults globally were overweight.
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Researchers concluded that the relationship between a higher BMI and increased mortality was “strong and positive in every global region we studied, except for south Asia, where numbers of deaths were small”. In a linked comment in the journal, three scientists from the National Institutes of Health in the United States point out the difficulties, when using BMI data, in accounting for fitness and physical activity, people’s diet and their history of disease – even though the study excluded people who had ever smoked and those who died in the first few years of the study so that those factors would not influence the results.
