In one of my posts, a couple of months back, I wrote that “Body Fat % […] is a much better indicator of a person’s fitness levels than the BMI (which are often subjective depending on a person’s frame-size or how active his lifestyle is)” and this is very much true. Think of a well built, muscular person: just using his body mass index would be a poor way to judge his health when most of his weight is muscle.
Recently, an article I had tagged in del.icio.us titled “‘BMI’ a Bust for Predicting Heart Risk” expounded the same theory that:
BMI, a ratio of weight to height — proved to be a bust for predicting death from heart disease in an analysis of 40 previously reported studies involving 250,000 patients with heart disease followed for an average of four years. The seemingly paradoxical findings do not mean that carrying excess weight is good for heart patients, researchers say. But they do suggest that better ways of measuring obesity are needed.
The finding that overweight patients did not die as often and had fewer heart-related problems than normal-weight patients was more surprising. But the Mayo researchers say the answer may lie in muscle mass. Since muscle weighs more than fat, it is possible that many of the people in the study who were considered overweight, with BMIs between 25 and 29.9, were really fitter with more muscle than the patients with lower BMIs. If this was the case, it would stand to reason that they would have fewer heart problems.
-Via WebMD
While obesity (BMI greter than 30) has long been understood to be a leading cause of mortality, the same could not be said of being overweight. Yesterday, however, the New England Journal of Medicine published a report titled “Overweight, Obesity, and Mortality in a Large Prospective Cohort of Persons 50 to 71 Years Old” (Abstract, Original Article(PDF)) which concludes that even being overweight (as measured by having a BMI between 25.0 and 29.9) is indeed associated with an increased risk of death.
The 10-year study of more than 500,000 U.S. adults found that those who were just moderately overweight in their fifties were 20 percent to 40 percent more likely to die in the next decade. Another study involving more than 1 million Korean adults, also being published in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, produced similar results.
The studies, both released yesterday, were aimed at helping resolve a long debate over whether the millions of Americans who are not obese but are nevertheless considered overweight are at significant risk.
-Via Washington Post
The study was conducted in the U.S. by the National Cancer Institute which surveyed 527,265 men and women aged 50 to 71 about their health and lifestyles, including their diet and physical activity, as well as their height and weight, including how much they weighed when they were 50.
After a decade, the researchers found that those who were moderately overweight when they were 50 were at significantly elevated risk of dying prematurely, and those who were obese were two to three times as likely. Just being overweight was not nearly as dangerous, but it still boosted the risk by 20 to 40 percent, the study found.
The findings were welcomed by public health and obesity experts as powerful new evidence that people should do whatever they can to maintain a healthy weight.
“The take-home message is that if you are not obese but just overweight, it’s still a good idea to lose weight,” said Thomas A. Wadden, president of the Obesity Society. “It’s kind of a bummer, but maybe this will help motivate people that it’s time to do something about their weight.”
By eating the Fitness Mantra way and exercising regularly, we can not only keep obesity at bay but also avoid being overweight and reduce significant risk to our health and life.
Technorati Tags: overweight, obesity
Related Posts:
For those not familiar with it, del.icio.us is a so-called “social bookmarking” website where users bookmark sites of interest and “tag” or “label” them into categories like “fitness”, “finance” and “technology”. Other users can then look for recently tagged sites/articles under these categories and even subscribe to an individual user’s links. You can get more detailed help about using the features of del.icio.us from their help page. I have started to use this service for Fitness Mantra by linking to the most pertinent news stories so you can always be updated with themall even if I don’t spotlight any of them on the main blog site.
