Chubby People Live Longer Than Skinny People
Posted: Monday, June 22, 2009
by Hilda Cang
Now, for the fatter group of people ( meaning those who have quite a clean bill of health
basically ) you have got good news. You can be rest-assured that being a little bit overweight will not be a threat to you as discovered in a study by an associate professor in Japan. The team has worked on a long period of 12 years to study people aged from 40 to 79. They have found out the difference between chubby people and skinny people. It is dangerous to be painfully thin as this will cause a series of unforeseen health hazard in terms of body resistance against diseases such as : pneumonia, common colds and the fragility of blood vessels, among others. Chubby people have a better body resistance against such diseases.
All the while, we have been warned about the danger of obesity, overweight has always been the biggest headache for most larger sized people. It may not be so based on this latest discovery.
According to the health ministry team, chubby people may expect to live longer by 6 to 7 years whereas the skinny people will have a shorter life span by 5 years, in comparison.
On top of that, chubby people tend to be easy with others or things . Very thin people are said to be quite difficult to handle !
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)Great article. Well done.Amazing, it is interesting to read alternative science and you allways find that rules allways have exeptions.Thanks for reading and commenting on this article at the same time. It is fun knowing someone out there is doing so.Hilda
This is wrong, Hilda.
40yo Japanese women whose weight was considered as normal (BMI 18.5-25) were found to live on average for a further 47.97 years, compared with chubby women (BMI 25-30) who lived another 48.05 years. That's a lifespan difference of 0.08 years (29 days).
Note that a lifespan difference of 29 days out of 48 years is not even close to statistically significant.
The researches also found that having a BMI of over 30 or under 18.5 shortened lifespan, which is unsurprising. The only statistically significant surprise was that they found that a BMI of less than 18.5 shortened lifespan even more than a BMI of over 30.
(The numbers were different for 40yo Japanese men, but the conclusion was the same: BMI 25-30 was slightly better than BMI 18.5-25, BMI over 30 was worse, and BMI under 18.5 was worst of all.)
Conclusion: a BMI of about 25 is probably optimal for 40 year old Japanese men and women.
Here's the article: www(dot)enotalone(dot)com/article/19692.html
Here's a BMI calculator: home(dot)fuse(dot)net/clymer/bmi/
Here's an obvious caveat which was not mentioned in the articles: The study did not last for 50 years, so BMI at age 40 was presumably calculated from study participants' (possibly erroneous) recollections of what their weight had been many years earlier.
What's more, the articles which I've found about this study say nothing about the study participants' BMI over the rest of their lives -- which surely would affect lifespan much more than BMI just at age 40.
Also, they apparently didn't distinguish between moderate obesity and severe obesity. The top end of their slightly-chubby range was a BMI of 30, which is only about 30-35 lbs overweight. It is likely that being severely overweight (e.g., 100 lbs) reduces lifespan dramatically.
Also, the low end their "normal" range (BMI 18.5) is very skinny. The notes on the BMI calculator site (above) suggest that a BMI of about 20-26 is optimal for middle-aged people, and that "nonsmokers with a consistent BMI within this range have the lowest risk of disease and premature death."
I speculate that if Professor Kuriyama had put the dividing line between "normal" and "underweight" at BMI 20, instead of 18.5, then the average life expectancies of both the "underweight" and "normal" cohorts would have been been better, and the normal weight people might even have had slightly longer lifespans than the slightly-chubby (BMI 25-30) people.
The bottom line is that, unsurprisingly, this study confirms that both severely overweight and severely underweight people have shortened life expectancies. However, you should not put much faith in the headlined conclusion, that being slightly chubby leads to longer lifespan. It probably does not.
Dave Burton
Cary, NC
email: burtonsys com/email/Thank you Dave for reading and commenting .Hilda
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