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Tue January 7, 2003 04:09 PM ET
CHICAGO (Reuters) -
Obesity can take years off your life, and the younger you are the more years you stand to lose, researchers said on Tuesday.
In the second such study in the space of a day, researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore compiled data from several U.S. mortality studies covering the past three decades and concluded an obese 20-year-old white man would lose 13 years of life.
"Our results confirm that obesity is a major public health problem that appears to lessen life expectancy markedly, especially among individuals in younger age groups," study author Kevin Fontaine wrote in this week's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association."Our estimates of years of life lost due to obesity strongly support the public health recommendation for adults to avoid obesity," the report said.
The earlier study of 3,457 adults published on Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine found obesity may shorten life expectancy by a magnitude similar to smoking among people who become obese by the age of 40.A person is obese when he or she weighs over 20 percent more than maximum healthy body weight.Obesity is known to stress the heart and result in higher rates of diseases such as diabetes.
The Johns Hopkins researchers said reduced life span projections were not as dire for overweight American blacks, who have higher rates of obesity than whites. But the findings related to obesity among blacks may be distorted by the studies' data limitations, said an editorial on the study published in the journal.Obesity, which the World Health Organization said was a growing global problem, affects about one in four American adults. Roughly two of three American adults are classified as overweight or obese, compared with one in four in the early 1960s, editorial writers JoAnn Manson and Shari Bassuk of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School wrote.
The editorial said the study "exposes only a small fraction of the toll of obesity," citing the loss of quality of life among obese people who suffer higher rates of illness and disability.The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute has a body mass index calculator and tables at http://nhlbisupport.com/bmi/bmicalc.htm.
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