More Weight for More Years?
Tuesday July 7, 2009
A study in Canada that looked at the body-mass index (a number that adjusts weight for height) and age of death of 11,326 adults found that a few extra pounds may be good for your longevity.
People who are underweight or extremely overweight tend to live the shortest, but having a few extra pounds seemed to help extend life expectancy a bit. The researchers think that the few extra pounds may be protective in old age as people face various health problem.
Hmm. I'm not sure what value this study really has. People with a few extra pounds may live longer than the "normal" weight people - but we don't know if it is the weight that is the key. There may be some other explanation why people have a few extra pounds, such as they may be living with another person, have different levels of financial resources, etc. This feels like an oversimplification, but an interesting one worth keeping an eye on in the future.
People who are underweight or extremely overweight tend to live the shortest, but having a few extra pounds seemed to help extend life expectancy a bit. The researchers think that the few extra pounds may be protective in old age as people face various health problem.
Hmm. I'm not sure what value this study really has. People with a few extra pounds may live longer than the "normal" weight people - but we don't know if it is the weight that is the key. There may be some other explanation why people have a few extra pounds, such as they may be living with another person, have different levels of financial resources, etc. This feels like an oversimplification, but an interesting one worth keeping an eye on in the future.
Body weight is irrelevant without mentioning the percentage of body fat. If more weight is the result of more muscle I can see why people are living longer because of it.
The last time this finding was reported in a different study a few years back, I was in a discussion with a physician who had read the whole study. She pointed out that the study had been performed by analyzing subjects’ body weight at the time of death. She astutely noted that when people die of conditions like cancer, there is a long wasting away process that occurs leading people to weigh less at the time of death, and that it was ludicrous to try to draw conclusions about body weight and mortality based on a person’s weight at the time of death without info on the cause of death. I wonder if the same methods were used in this study?
Good points, K.D., the same study also showed that underweight people were also more likely to have a higher mortality rate. So, the only people slanting the results (of 11,000) in the direction you are proposing would be ones that started overweight, got cancer (or other disease) that caused them to lose weight until they were “normal” and then died. If they continued to lose weight (as is common), they would have been classified as “underweight.” That’s not to say this study doesn’t have problems, it does, but the interesting thing to me is that researchers were unable to connect being overweight with an increased risk of death.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment.