In some cases, extra pounds are accompanied by additional years of life.
Being overweight increases the likelihood of diabetes, atherosclerosis, liver disease, and cancer. Obviously overweight people should live less than others? As they say, not everything is so simple – a lot depends on how exactly this excess weight appears.
Staff Ohio State University, University of Michigan and the Max Planck Institute for Demography analyzed medical histories of more than 4,500 adults and more than 3,700 of their children; medical records covered the time from 1948 to 2014. Thus, it was possible to compare two generations at once; each generation was analyzed from 31 to 80 years old. The authors of the work were primarily interested in the body mass index, which shows whether a person’s weight is normal for his height, or whether he is overweight, or, on the contrary, he is too thin. In addition, the body mass index allows you to distinguish simply overweight from obesity.
Body weight in humans changes throughout life, and changes in different ways. Someone in their youth may be fat, and then lose weight; someone gets fat with age; someone remains with a more or less constant body weight all their lives. The goal was to understand whether life expectancy was somehow related to the dynamics of body weight. We managed to isolate several such dynamics (recall that the analysis of the dynamics began at the age of 31). And oddly enough, the longest lived those who became adults with a normal weight and gradually gained overweight by old age, but not to obesity. They are followed in terms of life expectancy by those who have maintained normal weight all their lives. The third place was shared by those who have been more or less permanently overweight all their lives, and those who have been at the lower limit of normal weight all their lives (that is, thin, but without obvious pathology).
Then there were people who started out as overweight and lost weight with age. And, finally, those who were already obese by the age of 31 lived least of all others, and then it only worsened. The research results are fully described in the article in Annals of Epidemiology… It is worth clarifying that the authors of the work took into account various factors that can affect life expectancy: gender, bad habits, social status, etc.
It’s hard to say what kind of mechanism works here. However, it is worth noting that these data confirm the earlier results of the same researchers: in 2013 they published an article in which it was said that if a person is slightly overweight by the age of 50, then another 19 years of life are practically guaranteed to him – if only this excess weight will remain as it was.
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