Copyright 2009 Crain CommunicationsAll Rights Reserved
Business
Insurance
October 5, 2009
NEWS; Pg. 0006
647 words
Weighing health costs of a few extra pounds
Joanne Wojcik
Like many Americans, I’ve been battling the bulge for most of my adult life. Also like many Americans, my motives have been primarily cosmetic. It wasn’t until this “obesity epidemic” started making national news that I even considered the harm that the extra pounds could do to my health.Responding to those headlines, employers increasingly are encouraging their employees to lose weight and get fit, believing it will lower health care costs. Whether it’s weight-loss programs at work, onsite fitness facilities or a few bucks off their monthly health insurance premiums, workers are being prodded to drop pounds and adopt a healthier lifestyle. But based on the literature I’ve collected on the subject of obesity, I’m becoming a bit skeptical that carrying a few extra pounds is really all that bad for one’s health. For every study that suggests being overweight leads to health problems, there is another study that contradicts it.Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health’s Department of Nutrition published a study in the Sept. 30 online edition of the journal BMJ that found women who are obese in middle age are almost 80% more likely to have multiple health problems by the time they reach age 70.The researchers analyzed 20 years of data on 17,065 women of all sizes beginning at an average age of 50. When the study began, none of the women had major chronic conditions; but by the time they reached age 70, only about 10% of the women had what researchers termed “healthy survival,” and the obese women were 79% less likely to have healthy survival than their slim counterparts. Every 2.2 pounds of extra weight lowered the odds of healthy survival by 5%, according to the study.But another study in the June issue of the journal Obesity found that people who are overweight—defined as having a body mass index between 25 and 29.9—are actually 17% less likely to die prematurely than are people of normal weight, defined as those having a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9.So being overweight might not be the problem everyone thinks it is, said Dr. David H. Feeny, a senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore., and one of the study’s authors. In fact, being underweight may be a worse problem, he said. The study found that people with a BMI of less than 18.5 were 73% more likely to die prematurely than those of average weight.I’ve also found research that shows weight gain is an inevitable byproduct of the aging process. Think about it. If your parents were thin in their courtship pictures but got a little chubby as they reached old age, can you really expect to be thin for the rest of your life?A few years ago, I read an article that explained how women tend to gain weight in middle age as part of the body’s natural defense against post-menopausal bone loss. In fact, doing a recent Internet search, I discovered several studies that found maintaining or losing body weight during the menopausal transition may lead to reduced bone mineral density.A study by Paul Williams of the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that men also tend to gain weight naturally as they age, regardless of how hard they work out to try to keep it off. The 1997 study showed that in 4,769 runners between 18 and 50, weight gain occurred at the same rate almost regardless of the number of miles run per week. Per decade, the average six-foot-tall man gained about 3.3 pounds.So no matter how many studies I read that say it’s good for me to lose weight, I can’t help but consider those that say it doesn’t really matter. Regardless, I’ve decided I’m still going to pursue my weight-loss quest. But I may as well be honest about my real motive. I’ve got a whole closet full of size 6 suits that I hope to fit into again before they go out of style.Copyright 2009 Crain Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved.
October 9, 2009
Denotes premium content. Learn more about becoming an Insider here.
Please enable Javascript
