HEALTH: Cut Weight and Add Years to Life
There’s another reason – perhaps the most compelling of all – to cut your weight. A new study shows that obesity can take years off your life. “If you are heading towards obesity, it may be a good idea to lose weight,” said Sir Richard Peto, the study’s main statistician and a professor at Oxford University. He is among a group of British researchers at the University of Oxford who analyzed 57 studies – mostly in Europe and North America – following nearly a million people for an average of 10 to 15 years. Roughly 100,000 of those people died over the period, The Associated Press reports. To determine obesity, the researchers used the Body Mass Index (BMI), which divides a person’s weight in pounds by their height squared in feet. What they discovered is that death rates were lowest in people who had a BMI of 23 to 24, on the high side of the normal range, AP reports. The study was published online Wednesday in the medical journal, Lancet. According to AP, “Peto and colleagues found that people who were moderately fat, with a BMI from 30 to 35, lost about three years of life. People who were morbidly fat — those with a BMI above 40 — lost about 10 years off their expected lifespan, similar to the effect of lifelong smoking. Moderately obese people were 50 percent more likely to die prematurely than normal-weight people.”
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