‘Being fat cuts 1 to 10 years off one’s life’

PARIS: Being overweight shaves about a year off one’s life expectancy, a price which soars to about 10 years for the severely obese, a largescale study reported yesterday.

It refuted earlier findings that carrying a few extra kilos poses no perils. Instead, the study pointed to evidence that the risk of dying before your 70th birthday grows “steadily and steeply” along with an expanding waistline.

“This study shows that being overweight or obese is associated with a risk of premature death,” lead author Emanuele Di Angelantonio from the University of Cambridge said.

The risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease and cancer “are all increased”, he said.

Using data from almost 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.

“Severely obese people lose about 10 years of life expectancy,” Di Angelantonio said — which represents a one-in-two chance of dying before 70.

An international team of researchers sifted through data garnered from more than 10.6 million people in 239 large studies conducted between 1970 and last year in 32 countries in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and east and south Asia.

The collating effort was described as the largest-ever pooled data set on being overweight and mortality.

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.

The team divided these into categories according to their Body Mass Index (BMI), a ratio of weight-toheight squared, and compared the number and causes of death in each group.

The researchers found that the risk of dying before age 70 rose from 19 per cent in normal weight men to 29.5 per cent in the moderately obese group, and from 11 per cent to 14.6 per cent for women.

“This corresponds to an absolute increase of 10.5 per cent for men, and 3.6 per cent for women — three times as big,” The Lancet said.

They also found that the excess mortality risk was three times greater in men as in women. AFP