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.

Comments

so THAT'S the reason

[turkeydance]

there are more fat women than fat men.

Re:so THAT'S the reason

[alvinrod]

I don't expect it changes the overall rates that much, simply due to homosexuals being a small minority of the total population, but I remember one report that found that homosexual women were significantly more likely to be overweight as heterosexual women and homosexual men were significantly less likely to be overweight than heterosexual men. I don't know if the researchers had any idea why this occurs, but it's kind of interesting.

My woman is fat.....

[peterofoz]

Yes, mentioning that your woman is too obese is certainly more hazardous for men.

Re:My woman is fat.....

[inode_buddha]

... just not necessarily in the way that you would think...

Re:Only one Twitter hashtag is appropriate for thi

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you meant #MaleLivesFatter

Society is very much to blame

[Anonymous Coward]

We expect people to work ridiculously long hours at increasingly sedentary jobs and we wonder why people become more overweight. It's incredibly unhealthy for so many reasons. Poor people or those who were once poor are more prone to obesity because the fear of going hungry causes them to overeat when food is available. We have more than enough wealth to ensure that nobody goes hungry, but some people are too greedy to agree to part with any of their money for such purposes. And then we have fucked up people who think it's okay to shame people and mock them for being fat. It's awful to do that to any person, but it's also counterproductive and leads to self esteem issues that can lead to becoming even more obese. Yet there are plenty of people who are twisted enough to think this is okay.

I speak from experience that these are real issues. Having to spend more time sedentary has increased my weight. But I work on short contracts of a few months while I try to find a better job, and I'm always concerned about being out of work and what might happen. I can appreciate how this leads to overeating. Despite the portrayal of overweight people as lazy, I walk several miles a day to get exercise and am making the weight come off. However, I've had a ridiculous amount of people drive past while I'm out walking to get exercise and yell insults at me for my weight. Ironically, they're insulting me for being overweight while I'm actively working to lose weight. WTF?

Obesity is an awful epdemic. We have the ability to reverse the problem, but we can't bring ourselves to do so. WTF?

Re: Society is very much to blame

[ChrisMaple]

Law and right are only coincidentally related. You may have the legal power to control the spending of somebody else's money, but you do not have the right.

false

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:false

[AthanasiusKircher]

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.

There are old guys and there are fat guys

[zerofoo]

But there aren't many old, fat guys.

Re:Meat is the cause

[BradMajors]

Epidemiological studies show that populations with low meat consumption have lower life expectancy.

Re:Meat is the cause

[Anonymous Coward]

They lose the will to live when they can't get a decent steak.

Re:Meat is the cause

[AthanasiusKircher]

When humans stop eating meat and switch to whole-food plant based diets, the rates of all leading causes of death (obesity, cancer, heart disease, and pretty diseases of inflammation) drop. To anyone with a scientific mind, modern nutritional-science's data should pretty much indict animal based foods as the direct cause of obesity,

Before I reply further, I should note that I am NOT a major carnivore. I enjoy a good steak (sometimes a large one), but I actually only eat meat in maybe a couple meals each week. I've frequently gone several weeks without eating meat -- I just prefer to eat quality meat once in a while, rather than eating some industrial junk from a "tube" of hamburger every day.

So I have no strong reason to defend meat consumption, but I have been confronted with the vegetarian and vegan arguments from various people over the years, and I've spent a lot of time reading about the matter. For every study you cite, I could cite another that contradicts or qualifies the findings.

The problem with "modern nutritional science" is that it's trying to break down very complex systems and isolate a single variable within a huge set of possible human situations. Thus, there are literally hundreds of possible confounding factors that make the conclusions of your studies suspect.

Just for one major issue -- people who are vegetarian or vegan (at least in countries that don't have large religious populations that adhere to these) are disproportionately likely to have better lifestyles. They tend to be wealthier people who tend to exercise more and pay attention to what they eat and make deliberate choices not only to avoid meat but to avoid junk food in general, whereas the "default" person who eats meat in most modern societies probably also eats a lot of junk too.

along with the consumption of heavily processed foods.

And here you get at just one of the many possible confounding factors. Low fiber intake has also shown to be correlated with higher obesity, and that tends to be correlated with meat consumption. What if we did a study of people in the same socioeconomic status who shopped at similar supermarkets (often the pricier nicer ones with better quality stuff for the vegans) and controlled for the level of "processed food" (which itself isn't really the problem as much as additives like excess added sugar), level of fiber consumption, etc., etc.

If you actually compared "apples to apples" in terms of people and diets, just isolating meat consumption, would you see such an effect on obesity? I don't know, but I'd bet LOTS of money that if there is an effect, it's a LOT smaller than most of these studies claim. Maybe meat consumption is itself a contributing factor to obesity problems, but it's far from the only one... and I'm not convinced yet from studies that it's even a major one.

Re:Only one Twitter hashtag is appropriate for thi

[__aaclcg7560]

Being fat is a choice. Own it AND pay for it, I say.

Not always. A sixth-grade principal tried to fat shame my parents by calling them into a conference to explain why I was the proverbial fat kid at school. He was shocked to find out that my parents were skinnier than he was. It became a big mystery on how two skinny people can have a fat kid. For three years I was subjected to a dozen blood tests to determine why I was fat. No medical explanation was ever found. After my mother passed away from breast cancer a few years ago, I came across some black-and-white photos of her side of the family. The guys at the turn of the century were bigger than me and probably lumberjacks back then. Maybe genetics skipped a few generations throughout the Depression and World War II.

In unrelated news...

[penguinoid]

In unrelated news, men are 3 times less likely than women to care about their weight.

Re:100% WRONG!

[hcs_$reboot]

You should really have attended these sex education classes ; there is actually a difference.

Re:Only one Twitter hashtag is appropriate for thi

[Anonymous Coward]

bullshit. if energy in energy out, you'll lose weight. DNA cannot stop physics.

Re:I'm morbidly obese...

[serviscope_minor]

Except for one small problem: I don't believe that bullshit.

What bullshit?

Morbidly obese doesn't mean "you're guaranteed to drop dead", much like smoking 60 fags a day doesn't mean you're guaranteed to drop dead. Excess weight is, however, causally correlated with a wide variety of different health problems. If you don't believe that then you are simply engaging in denialism.

You might have won the genetic lottery. It happens. Not everyone gets all or any of the health problems from being very overweight. The effects for you might simply be limited to the somewhat mechanical ones of making it less easy to get around and having a heavier load on your joints so more wear when you do get around.

Why? Because I take care of myself. I eat a 150g carbs/1,500-calorie diet,

If you are that overweight on 1,500 calories a day you might well have an undiagnosed thyroid problem. That's an extremely low intake for an adult male. A somewhat distant family member of mine had hypothyroidism undiagnosed for about 20 years. He was obese, ate about the same as you (he tried really hard to lose the weight) and could only reliably lose weight on about 1000 calories per day. Most of the other symptoms are vague and non specific and can easily be attributed to other things (and you're not guaranteed to get any or all of them).

and don't allow fat shamers to bully me.

That's good, fat shaming is a dick move.

However, just because it's a dick move, doesn't make the health risks any less real.

Although I haven't been to a doctor in 15 years, I'm in better health today than I ever was before.

So how do you know?

Re:Only one Twitter hashtag is appropriate for thi

[Hognoxious]

There are limits to adaptation. See also: Auschwitz.

Re:Amazes me how much these scientists have missed

[careysub]

BMI is antiquated as a measure of health because it completely ignores body composition.

As a weight-lifter, I am very well aware of the limitations of the BMI since it declares everyone with a lot of muscle mass "overweight" or even "obese" even if their body-fat is in the low single digits.

But it is an excellent tool for studying populations, where the odd individual to whom it does not apply are averaged out of importance. This is what the BMI was developed for, and it is well proven in this role.

It is a useful tool for assessing the health status of most individuals also, but not everyone. Healthy weight increases with age, it is normal and healthier to carry somewhat more weight, but apparently there is no age-adjusted scale available, strangely enough. It is less accurate for very tall people (though an adjusted BMI scale is available for this). And it is useless for people will a lot of muscle mass, as I mentioned above.

It is annoying that most health advice sources ignore these caveats, or seem utterly unaware of them.