From Your Health Journal…..”Another great article from The Times Of India, one of my favorite sites to promote. They always have such quality stories, many pertaining to health – very informative and educational. Today, I found an article on their site called Death Risk From Obesity Increases With Age. The article discusses a new study which states that at age 65 and older, having an elevated BMI won’t shorten your lifespan, and may even extend it has been proved wrong. This is an interesting find, but I worry that many times, mixed messages confuse people on proper health. This study should put to rest the notion that it’s possible to ‘age out’ of obesity risk, and provides a powerful counter factual against those who say concern over obesity is over hyped. Listen, the bottom line, no matter what age, try your best to eat properly, exercise, hydrate adequately, and get plenty of sleep. Not sure if it is possible to age out of sickness, but just trying to take care of oneself to the best of our ability is the best preventative medicine. Please visit The Times Of India web site to read the complete article.”
From the article…..
The “obesity paradox” that says, at age 65 and older, having an elevated BMI won’t shorten your lifespan, and may even extend it has been proved wrong in a new study.
Researchers have found that as obese Americans grow older, in fact, their risk of death climbs.
Ryan Masters, PhD, and Bruce Link, PhD, at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, in collaboration with Daniel Powers, PhD, at the University of Texas argue that past studies of longevity and obesity were biased due to limitations of the National Health Interview Survey, or NHIS, which provides information on obesity.
The survey excludes individuals who are institutionalized, such as in a hospital or nursing home—a group largely made up of seniors. Consequently, the data is overrepresented by older respondents who are healthy, including the relatively healthy obese.
What’s more, many obese individuals fail to make it to age 65—and thus do not live long enough to participate in studies of older populations.
“Obesity wreaks so much havoc on one’s long-term survival capacity that obese adults either don’t live long enough to be included in the survey or they are institutionalized and therefore also excluded. In that sense, the survey data doesn’t capture the population we’re most interested in,” said Dr. Masters, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Columbia’s Mailman School and the study’s first author.
To read the complete article…..Click here