Obesity may take 3 years off life: study
Risk of premature death higher in overweight men than overweight women
LONDON— Being too heavy may cost you your life — literally. Scientists say overweight people die one year earlier than expected and that moderately obese people die up to three years prematurely.
Doctors have long warned that being overweight can lead to health complications including heart disease, stroke and cancer, and previous studies have already found that extra pounds can take years off your life, based mostly on data from Europe and North America.
In the new study, which the authors say is the largest-ever such analysis, researchers sifted through data for nearly four million non-smoking adults in 32 countries published from 1970 to last year. They compared the risk of death to people’s body mass index, or BMI, a measure of body fat that is calculated using height and weight.
They defined a BMI from 18.5 to 25 as normal, 25-30 as overweight, 3035 as moderately obese and over 40 as severely obese.
Overweight people lose a year of life on average and moderately overweight people lose three years, said Richard Peto of Oxford University, one of the study authors.
The study also found that being obese is far more dangerous for men than for women.
“The excess risk of premature death is about three times as big for a man who gets fat as for a woman who gets fat,” Peto said.
According to the World Health Or- ganization, 15 per cent of women worldwide and 11 per cent of men are obese. Overall, the WHO estimates that more than one billion adults are overweight and another 600 million people are obese.
Carrying too much weight is now second to smoking as a cause of premature death in North America and Europe; smoking causes about a quarter of all premature deaths there while being too heavy now causes about 14 to 20 per cent of such deaths.
Peto acknowledged that more is needed than to simply advise people to lose weight, because dropping even a few pounds and keeping them off is notoriously difficult.
“It might be easier to recommend that people try very hard not to put on weight in the first place, particularly before they hit middle age,” he said.