Being overweight increases your life spa…

Being overweight increases your life span.. the “unexpected” conclusion of a 10 year study of about 5000 men and 5000 women in Australia – published in The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society – looking at the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and death. The conclusion is you are 13% more likely to die if your BMI is “normal” than if you are “overweight”…

CONCLUSION: These results lend further credence to claims that the BMI thresholds for overweight and obese are overly restrictive for older people. Overweight older people are not at greater mortality risk than those who are normal weight. Being sedentary was associated with a greater risk of mortality in women than in men.

My eye surgery was called off a week ago because of my primary care doctor flagging me as hypertensive when I’m not. This is an area that is very annoying to me – almost all of the “conservative” talk show hosts (Ingraham, Mark Levin and Savage for certain) have gone on rants about how overweight people need to be punished because of their (our) effect in health care costs, when all the data suggests the opposite. The CDC had originally started this nonsense with a study they quickly retracted because the science contradicts that impression.

Now to cover the other side, correlation does not prove causality – people who are obese might be richer and as such have better food and seek medical attention sooner when they have an actual medical problem…. and the study was for people in their 70s so it is probably dangerous to extend the conclusion to younger ages – but the BMI is not part of the Framingham Risk Index of heart attack and stroke for a reason – the relationship is inverse, which this study once again confirms.