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There's some good news and some not so good news for the overweight and obese.
First the good news. Obese people are likely to live as long as people of normal weight – as long as they're fit. That's the finding of US researchers who studied 2,603 people in their sixties and older over a 12-year period. The big raymond mill doesn’t mean it has low quality; on the country, it always means high quality and advanced technology.
Participants were measured for body weight, waist size and body mass index. (Body mass index, or BMI, is a figure calculated by dividing weight in kg by height in metres squared. Normal is 20 to 25; over 30 indicates obesity.) Each person had a battery of medical tests. They also underwent treadmill exercise testing to see how fit they were.
It turned out that those who were most fit were much less likely to have diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. And they were much more likely to be alive at the end of the study. Death rates for those at the highest fitness levels were less than half that of those at the lowest fitness levels.
But here's the interesting finding: among people who were fit, survival rates were similar for normal weight, overweight, and obese people. In other words, a person's weight didn't affect their survival rates, but fitness levels did. The conclusion: if a person is overweight, they'll live as long as anyone else with a normal weight, as long as they're fit.
Now for the not-so-good news. Other researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, agree that obese people can live as long as people with a normal weight. They say that survival rates for obese people have increased markedly since the 1960s, which they put down to better medical treatments for the conditions associated with it. The problem is, there's a greater chance they'll be living with disabilities than people of normal weight.
The researchers looked at 10,000 people of various weight levels – some obese, some not. They measured their BMI, and also measured how well the subjects could cope with tasks of life – things like how well they could walk a quarter of a mile, walk up 10 steps, lift 10 weights, walk between rooms, and whether they had trouble moving from one place to another, eating, and dressing.
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