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Obesity Is Three Times As Deadly For Men Than Women, Says Study (telegraph.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Telegraph: Researchers at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard universities found in the biggest ever study into weight and death that obesity is three times more deadly for men than women, and that being slightly overweight raises the risk of dying early. Telegraph reports: "Obese people can expect to lose three years of life while the average overweight person will die 12 months sooner than they would have if they were a healthy size. Usually fewer than one in five men will die before the age of 70, but that jumps to nearly one in three for the moderately obese, and eight in 10 for the morbidly obese. In contrast around one in 10 women can expect to die early, with obesity raising the risk to one in seven. While obesity raises the risk of early death by just three per cent for women, it is 10 per cent for men, more than three times as much. Around 61 per cent of adults are currently overweight or obese and the average weight of Britons has been steadily increasingly since the 1970s. In 1975 the average Briton had a BMI of 23, which is considered a healthy weight. But today that has risen to 27, with the average person now overweight. It means that since the 1970s, every person in Briton has roughly gained more than three pounds (1.5kg) per decade. Ten types of cancer are linked to excess weight which can also lead to Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease and a range of other health problems. Researchers compiled data from 10.6 million people who took part in 239 studies between 1970 and 2015, in 32 different countries. The study found an increased risk of premature death for people who were underweight, as well as for people classed as overweight." According to a study published in the Lancet in April, obese people now outnumber the underweight population for perhaps the first time in history.
People are overweight because they consume more calories than they burn. It is that simple. Almost no amount of exercise will change that. Your body will burn more calories doing nothing all day than you running a mile. Exercise will improve your health but it's affect on your weight are minimal.
This is misguided. I think I understand where you are starting from, but your general conclusion doesn't follow. (Nor does it negate GP's argument that sedentary jobs, etc. may contribute to obesity.)
You're correct that calorie intake is generally much more significant in weight maintenance (or weight loss) than exercise. To lose a pound per week, for example, you'd have to have a calorie deficit of roughly 500 calories/day. That's much easier to achieve through dietary change than through exercise alone. And if you do it through exercise alone, you can negate that deficit simply by having a slice of cake for dessert.
That said, your next step doesn't follow. Sedentary lifestyles can easily contribute to obesity, since effects of no exercise can add up significantly over time. The fundamental problem with "dieting" is that people pack on pounds over years, but then expect to lose them all in a month or something. It may have taken you ten years to put on those 50 pounds, but you just can't lose it in a few weeks... it's impossible.
And the only way to lose weight at a significant rate is generally to reduce intake, as I said.
On the other hand, that does NOT mean there's no effect of exercise on weight maintenance. Take that 50 lbs. gain over 10 years -- that's an excess of approximately 50 calories per day. 50 calories per day is an amount of exercise that can easily be expended by having a job that just requires you to move around a little bit more. But that lack of exercise CAN add up significantly over the years.
All that said, the issue is much more complicated, since weight maintenance has to do with appetite and feedback mechanisms too, which are affected by mental state, physical fitness, level of exercise, and all sort of other things. But the main point is that lack of even a small amount of exercise CAN add up to significant weight shifts over time, at least in theory. So sedentary work lifestyle MAY be a contributing factor to a long-term trend. None of that has anything to do with the fact that diet can have a much larger effect than exercise when one is trying to make RAPID weight changes.