Overweight People Live Longer Than Skinny People

By Margarita Nahapetyan

There are finally some good news for overweight people - Japanese Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry has found in their study that being very skinny is even more dangerous than being fat, and that slightly chubby people live longer on average, when compared to individuals with other physiques.

According to the new findings, people who are a little overweight at the age of 40 years, live between six to seven years longer than their very thin counterparts, whose average life expectancy was found to be shorter by approximately five years than that of obese people. According to Shinichi Kuriyama, an associate professor at Tohoku University's Graduate School of Medicine, who carried out the long-term study of middle-aged and elderly people, skinny people are exposed to an extremely high risk. "We had expected thin people would show the shortest life expectancy but did not expect the difference to be this large," Kuriyama said.

For a study purposes, which was led by Ichiro Tsuji, a professor at Tohoku University, the investigators analyzed the health of nearly 50,000 people with the ages between 40 and 79 years, over a 12-year period. All people lived in the northern Japanese prefecture of Miyagi. Researchers examined the past physiques of all the participants and how long they lived after the age of 40 years. After that, they split them into four weight categories according to the body mass index, or BMI, calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by their squared height in meters.

After a thorough analysis, the experts were able to find that male participants with regular weight (with BMI within a normal range between 18.5 and 25) at the age of 40 years, lived for an additional average of 39.94 years, while those individuals who were considered overweight (BMI of between 25 and 30) at the age of 40 lived 41.64 years more. Women, whose weight was considered as normal, were found to live on average for a further 47.97 years, when compared with chubby women-who lived another 48.05 years, according to the study.

Furthermore, the study showed that men and women with obesity (BMI of 30 or more), lived an additional 39.41 and 46.02 years, respectively. But skinny men (BMI of less than 18.5) were on average found to live 34.54 more years, and thin women another 41.79 years.

This remarkable result could really become an alarming news for people who are obsessed with losing weight and who avoid being called "metabo," a Japanese term that is used to describe people with metabolic syndrome.

The experts said that among possible explanations as to why skinny people are at risk of dying prematurely include the fact that many thin individuals smoke and also a theory that underweight people are more vulnerable to infections and contagious diseases. However, the link between physique and life expectancy is not yet clearly studied and understood. Dr.Kuriyama said that people are not going to extend their lives by trying to put an extra kilograms on.

But the study also found that the chubbier people are, the more are their medical expenses. The average lifetime medical expenses for overweight people after the age of 40 years is $158,000 for men and $193,000 for women - both 30 per cent higher than thin people would spend.