…but don’t overdo it. TIME takes up the story:

Being Overweight Is Linked to Lower Risk of Mortality

The longest lived among us aren’t necessarily those who are of normal weight, says a new study.

According to new research this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), researchers say that being overweight may lead to a longer life.

The somewhat surprising conclusion comes from an enormous, detailed review of over 100 previously published research papers connecting body weight and mortality risk among 2.88 million study participants living around the world. The new research confirms that obese people, and particularly those who are extremely obese, tend to die earlier than those of normal weight. But the findings also suggest that people who are overweight (but not obese) may live longer than people with clinically normal body weight.

…..Overall, people who were overweight but not obese were 6% less likely to die during the average study period than normal-weight people. That advantage held among both men and women, and did not appear to vary by age, smoking status, or region of the world. The study looked only at how long people lived, however, and not how healthy they were whey the died, or how they rated their quality of life.

Why would overweight people live the longest?

Flegal and her co-authors suggest that it’s possible that overweight and obese people get better medical care, either because they show symptoms of disease earlier or because they’re screened more regularly for chronic diseases stemming from their weight, such as diabetes or heart problems. There is also some evidence that heavier people may have better survival during a medical emergencies such as infections or surgery; if you get pneumonia and lose 15 lbs, it helps to have 15 lbs to spare, for example.

Full Report

I read that as “get a big fat, live longer”,

I love research these days, you don’t even have to do something new, just use other peoples data and combine it into one…brilliant.

Paul Campos’s take on this study is interesting:

Our Absurd Fear of Fat

…….To put some flesh on these statistical bones, the study found a 6 percent decrease in mortality risk among people classified as overweight and a 5 percent decrease in people classified as Grade 1 obese, the lowest level (most of the obese fall in this category). This means that average-height women — 5 feet 4 inches — who weigh between 108 and 145 pounds have a higher mortality risk than average-height women who weigh between 146 and 203 pounds. For average-height men — 5 feet 10 inches — those who weigh between 129 and 174 pounds have a higher mortality risk than those who weigh between 175 and 243 pounds.

Now, if we were to employ the logic of our public health authorities, who treat any correlation between weight and increased mortality risk as a good reason to encourage people to try to modify their weight, we ought to be telling the 75 million American adults currently occupying the government’s “healthy weight” category to put on some pounds, so they can move into the lower risk, higher-weight categories.

In reality, of course, it would be nonsensical to tell so-called normal-weight people to try to become heavier to lower their mortality risk. Such advice would ignore the fact that tiny variations in relative risk in observational studies provide no scientific basis for concluding either that those variations are causally related to the variable in question or that this risk would change if the variable were altered.

…….In other words, there is no reason to believe that the trivial variations in mortality risk observed across an enormous weight range actually have anything to do with weight or that intentional weight gain or loss would affect that risk in a predictable way.

……Don’t expect those who have made their careers on fomenting panic to understand that our current definition of “normal weight” makes absolutely no sense.

Full Spiel

‘spose you can forget a few things like cancer patients being quite lean when they die etc. etc.

The pommy bitch who has trashed one of our living legends has got him on what looks like a life threatening diet.

I see Bubbles has started this years campaign against “the reason he needs to go on a diet”, a tad earlier than usual.

:)

Au contraire, I’m just the messenger in this thread.

I’m wanting to lose weight for aesthetic and quality-of-life reasons.

“In addition, baselessly categorizing at least 130 million Americans — and hundreds of millions in the rest of the world — as people in need of “treatment” for their “condition” serves the economic interests of, among others, the multibillion-dollar weight-loss industry and large pharmaceutical companies, which have invested a great deal of money in winning the good will of those who will determine the regulatory fate of the next generation of diet drugs.”

Does he drive a water powered Land Rover?

He’s rather too “Fat Acceptance” for my liking, and he seems to ignore one of the suggestions raised by this study – that the moderately overweight people might be benefiting from medical intervention that the thinner people don’t bother with (such as drugs for cholesterol & blood pressure etc).

But he seems to be talking sense when he suggests that in terms of lifespan, current definitions of “normal weight” are too narrow.

Ooh, a meta-analysis for poikilotherm!

(I haven’t read the thread in toto yet. Patients keep getting in the way)

You can tell I love them for all their validity, yes?

poikilotherm said:

You can tell I love them for all their validity, yes?

*they usually are valid, just close to useless.