Being even slightly overweight in adulthood may increase a person’s risk of early death, a new study finds.
Earlier this month, researchers at Boston University and Harvard University published a review of three studies that together followed more than 225,000 adults, all health care professionals, for eight to 20 years. The review showed that being even slightly overweight can increase a person’s risk of dying by 6 percent, and for those who are obese, by a whopping 73 percent.
The main causes of death were heart and lung disease and cancer. And the more overweight people were, the greater their chances of dying prematurely.
The findings contradict a previous study that analyzed nearly 100 studies that appeared to show that being slightly overweight was healthful, which came to be known as the “obesity paradox.” The authors of the recent study explain that the major flaw in that study was that it only measured participants’ body fat once, so there was no way to see whether they had lost weight over time.
