A study which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, has been labelled as a ‘pile of rubbish’ and with a ‘horrific message’ by wellness experts, as it suggests that being overweight can lead to a longer life. The researchers found that being severely obese or being underweight cuts your life expectancy, but also said that people who were overweight were less likely to die prematurely than people with a ‘healthy’ weight.
For this study, researchers at the US National Centre for Health Statistics examined the comparison between BMI and death rates in 97 studies. You’re considered healthy if you have a BMI between 19 and 25, but the study showed that overweight people, whose BMI was between 25 and 30, were in fact 6% less likely to die early than those in the ‘normal weight’ group, and people who were mildly obese (with a BMI of 30-35) were no more likely to die prematurely than people with a healthy BMI.
The authors said that being ‘overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality’ and surmised that this could be because overweight people get more medical treatment than regular weight people, for problems such as blood pressure, for example, and being heavier increases your ability to survive from being severely ill in hospital, though the researchers did admit that they only looked at deaths, not years spent free of ill-health.
However, the results have incurred a lot of disbelief. Professor John Wass, vice president of the Royal College of Physicians, asked ‘Have you ever seen a 100-year-old human being who is overweight? The answer is you probably haven’t.’ According to Wass, large people die years before this due to health problems and higher levels of Type 2 diabetes, and with regard to this study ‘Huge pieces of evidence go against this, countless other studies point in the other direction.’
Other experts weighed in on the results, such as Donald Berry, from the University of Texas, who argues ‘Some portion of those thin people are actually sick, and sick people tend to die sooner’. Dr Walter Willett, from the Harvard School of Public Health, added ‘This is an even greater pile of rubbish’ than a study conducted by the same group in 2005, and Tam Fry, from the National Obesity Forum in the UK, said ‘It’s a horrific message to put out at this particular time. We shouldn’t take it for granted that we can cancel the gym, that we can eat ourselves to death with black forest gateaux.’
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