obese shortens life

Obesity knocks 20 years of good health off your life and can accelerate death by eight years

• Being obese deprives a person of up to two decades of healthy living
• This is because they are likely to suffer heart disease and diabetes  
• The figures were calculated using a computer model 
• Researchers say this highlights need to eat healthily and take exercise 

Being obese can shorten life by eight years and blight up to two decades with ill-health, warn scientists.

They used a computer model to predict the lifelong toll of being overweight.

Their calculations show that diabetes and heart disease are set to deprive an obese person of up to 19 years of healthy living.

For the very obese, with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 35 or more, between one and eight years of life were likely to be lost.

Overweight people with BMI scores of 25 to 30 were predicted to have their lives shortened by up to three years.

Body mass index (BMI), a measurement relating weight to height, is used to assess whether an individual is overweight.

A healthy or normal weight is a BMI score of 18.5 to 24.99 - above that is a sliding scale to life-threatening fatness.

Between 25 and 29.9 is defined as 'overweight' and a BMI over 30 is defined as clinically obese, although the result may be misleading for sportsmen and women, and pregnant women.

Researchers used data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which combines personal interviews with physical examinations, diagnostic procedures and tests.

The data was run through a disease-stimulation model to estimate the risk of developing diabetes and cardiovascular disease in adults of different body weight.

The effect of excess weight on cutting life short was greatest for the young and fell with increasing age, says the study published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal.

Obese young adults also suffered the greatest loss in terms of healthy years, compared to people of normal weight.

Professor Grover said: ‘These clinically meaningful calculations should prove useful for obese individuals and health professionals to better appreciate the scale of the problem and the substantial benefits of a healthier lifestyle including changes to diet and regular physical activity.’

Overweight individuals were estimated to lose between 0 and 3 years of life expectancy, depending on their age and gender.

Obese people were estimated to lose between 1 and 6 years, with the very obese losing between 1 and 8 years.

Excess weight also affects the duration of time when people can expect to be free of obesity-associated cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

The study shows being overweight or obese is associated with two to four times as many healthy life-years lost than total years of life lost.

The highest losses in healthy life-years were in young adults aged between 20 and 29 years old, amounting to around 19 years for very obese men and women.

Source: dailymail