CHICAGO (AP) — Being 25 pounds overweight doesn't appear to raise your risk of dying from cancer or heart disease, says a new government study that seems to vindicate Grandma's claim that a few extra pounds won't kill you.
Released just a few weeks before Thanksgiving, the findings might comfort some who can't seem to lose those last 15 pounds. And they hearten proponents of a theory that it's possible to be "fit and fat."The news isn't all good: Overweight people do have a higher chance of dying from diabetes and kidney disease. And people who are obese — generally those more than 30 pounds overweight for their height — have a higher risk of death from a variety of ills, including some cancers and heart disease.
However, having a little extra weight actually seemed to help people survive some illnesses — results that baffled several leading health researchers."Excess weight does not uniformly increase the risk of mortality from any and every cause, but only from certain causes," said the study's lead author Katherine Flegal, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The study, which appears in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association, analyzed the body-mass index of people who died from various diseases. In many cases, the risks of death were substantial for obese people — those with a body-mass index, or BMI, of at least 30. Also surprising was that overweight people were up to about 40 percent less likely than normal-weight people to die from several other causes including emphysema, pneumonia, injuries and various infections. The age group that seemed to benefit most from a little extra padding were people aged 25 to 59; older overweight people had reduced risks for these diseases, too.Why extra fat isn't always deadly and might even help people survive some illnesses is unclear and in fact disputed by ...
Continue reading SIZE 12 IS THE NEW 4: EXTRA WEIGHT WON'T RAISE DEATH RISk.