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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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Will Extra Fat Be A Threat To Our Life? When people tell you “the extra 11 kilos of extra weight in your body would not raise your risk of dying from cancer or heart disease.” Do you believe it? I bet most of us will be very sceptical because this seems to deviate from what we used to know in the past: “Overweight people do have a higher chance of dying from diabetes and kidney disease, and those obese ones are at a higher risk of death from a number of illnesses including heart disease and some cancer.” People who are obese are those weighing more than 13.6 kilos overweight for their height, or those with a body-mass index, or BMI, of at least 30. In fact, the statement was backed by the findings of a study conducted by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and appeared on the Journal of the American Medical Association on November 7, 2008. The study also indicated that having a little extra weight actually seemed to help people survive some illnesses. The findings seemed to support a theory that “fit and fat” is possible. It might also comfort people who just cannot lose the extra kilos they have; especially it was released a few weeks before the thanksgiving holiday when Americans typically overeat.
This was the second study made by the same scientists from CDC. Two years ago, they suggested that deaths from being too fat were overstated. With the same data used 2 years ago, the scientists from CDC looked at specific causes of death along with new mortality figures from 2004 for 2.3 million US adults. They also analyzed the body-mass index of people who died from various diseases. Specifically, obesity raised the risk of death from heart disease, diabetes and kidney disease, and several cancers previously linked with excess weight, including breast, colon and pancreatic cancer. But people who were just overweight (having a BMI between 25 and 30) did not increase their risk of dying from heart disease or any kind of cancer. The report further pointed out that overweight people up to about 40 per cent were 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 this were people aged 25 to 59; older overweight people had reduced risks for these diseases, too. They concluded in their report that excess weight does not uniformly increase the risk of mortality from any and every cause, but only from certain causes. Yet, they were unable to explain why extra fat is not always deadly and might even help people survive some illnesses. Needless to say, many health experts have found such controversial findings puzzling and even misleading. Furthermore, it was contradicting to recommendations made by recent studies. For example, “staying slim” tops a recent list of recommendations for preventing cancer in a report from the World Cancer Research Fund and American Institute for Cancer Research. While the debates are going on, perhaps we should follow the suggestion made by one of the experts: “people should focus instead on healthful eating and exercise, and stop obsessing about carrying a few extra pounds or becoming supermodel thin.”
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