Being obese or skinny 'can cut four years of life': study

People at the top and bottom ends of Body Mass Index risk having shorter lives, reveals study

Being overweight or underweight could knock four years off life expectancy, a study in a Lancet journal suggests. The report involved nearly two million people who were registered with doctors in the UK. Researchers found that, from the age of 40, people at the higher end of the healthy Body Mass Index (BMI) range had the lowest risk of dying from disease. But, people at the top and bottom ends of the BMI risked having shorter lives, reported BBC News.

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The study, published in the Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, showed that life expectancy for obese men and women was 4.2 and 3.5 years shorter respectively than people in the entire healthy BMI weight range. The difference for underweight men and women was 4.3 and 4.5 years respectively.

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BMI was associated with all causes of death categories, except transport-related accidents, including cancer, cardiovascular diseases and respiratory diseases. However, not everybody in the healthy category is at the lowest risk of disease, according to report author Dr Krishnan Bhaskaran. "For most causes of death we found that there was an 'optimal' BMI level, with risk of death increasing both below and above that level,” he said. "At BMIs below 21, we observed more deaths from most causes, compared with the optimum BMI levels. However, this might partly reflect the fact that low body weight can be a marker of underlying ill-health.

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Bhaskaran continued, "For most causes of death, the bigger the weight difference, the bigger the association we observed with mortality risk. So a weight difference of half a stone would make a relatively small (but real) difference; we could detect these small effects because this was a very large study."

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