You never want to think that it’s too late to lose weight. But this news out of Stockholm, Sweden puts the urgency of childhood obesity into perspective…
According to a Danish study presented at the International Congress on Obesity in Stockholm, men who are obese by 20 years old will on average die eight years earlier than their healthier peers.
The study examined more than 5,000 military enlistees, starting at age 20 through 80 years old. Of those, about 2,000 were obese from the beginning.
What they found was the risk for premature death in those men who were already obese increased 10 percent for every point above the healthy level of a 25 Body Mass Index.
“Our finding shows that at any given age, an obese man was twice as likely to die as a man who was not obese and that obesity at age 20 years had a constant effect on death up to 60 years later,” said lead author Esther Zimmerman of Copenhagen University Hospital.
The researchers compared two groups, examining the mortality in a sample of 1,930 obese male military conscripts with that of a random sample of 3,601 non-obese male military enlistees.
“At age 70 years, 70 percent of the men in the comparison group and 50 percent of those in the obese group were still alive and we estimated that from middle-age the obese were likely to die eight years earlier than those in the comparison group,” said Esther Zimmermann of Copenhagen University Hospital.
(via: MSNBC)