Overweight:
Men are more likely to die early than women if they put on excess weight, study shows
Obesity raises the risk of early death by just 3 percent for women, it is 10 percent for men, more than three times as much.
Piling on the pounds is three times more deadly for men than women and even being slightly overweight raises the risk of dying early, the biggest ever study into weight and death has shown.
Obese people can expect to lose three years of life while the average overweight person will die 12 months sooner than they would have if they were a healthy size, researchers at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard universities found.
Usually fewer than one in five men will die before the age of 70, but that jumps to nearly one in three for the moderately obese, and eight in 10 for the morbidly obese.
In contrast around one in 10 women can expect to die early, with obesity raising the risk to one in seven. While obesity raises the risk of early death by just three per cent for women, it is 10 per cent for men, more than three times as much.
“We found that men who were obese were at much higher risk of premature death than obese women,” said Dr Emanuele Di Angelantonio from the University of Cambridge.
“This is consistent with previous observations that obese men have greater insulin resistance, liver fat levels, and diabetes risk than women.”
Around 61 per cent of adults are currently overweight or obese and the average weight of Britons has been steadily increasingly since the 1970s.
In 1975 the average Briton had a BMI of 23, which is considered a healthy weight. But today that has risen to 27, with the average person now overweight. It means that since the1970s,e very person in Brit on has roughly gained more than three pounds (1.5kg) per decade.
Ten types of cancer are linked to excess weight which can also lead to Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease and a range of other health problems.
Obesity-related disease currently costs the health service £47 billion a year, just under half the entire NHS budget.
Researchers compiled data from 10.6 million people who took part in 239 studies between 1970 and 2015, in 32 different countries.
The study found an increased risk of premature death for people who were underweight, as well as for people classed as overweight.
The risk increased steadily and steeply as BMI increased, which is measured by calculating height and weight. By the time men reached the highest class of obesity their risk of early death had increased more than four-fold, meaning eight in 10 men will die prematurely. For women morbid obesity increased their chance of dying early by 2.7 times.
The researchers estimated that one in seven premature deaths could be avoided, the equivalent of around 32,000 in the UK, if the overweight and obese slimmed down.
“Obesity is second only to smoking as a cause of premature death in Europe”, said co-author Professor Sir Richard Peto, University of Oxford.
The academics also said the research refuted the “obesity paradox” in which recent studies had suggested that fat could be protective in some instances.
Tam Fry of the National Obesity Forum said: “The paper runs a coach and horses through the advice that it does you no harm to be fat.
“Fat can kill you and the fatter you are the more life you are likely lose unless you take steps to stay healthier. Women, I am glad to say, have got the message, look after themselves better and are therefore at substantially less risk of early demise. Would that men did the same.”
Professor Peter Weissberg, medical director at the British Heart Foundation, which helped fund the research, added: “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.
The research was published in The Lancet.