If one is to believe new research published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), then you would need to believe that being overweight may lead to a longer life.

We were not convinced by the headline either. However, the study comprised an enormous amount of work and was essentially a detailed review of more than 100 previously published research papers connecting body weight and mortality risk.

Astoundingly, the total number of participants covered was around 2,88 million, and they came from all over the world.

But, obese people, and moreover those who are extremely obese, will still die earlier than those of normal weight. The interesting part was that those who have a little extra warmth and a bit more padding may live longer than people with clinically normal body weight.

The study’s lead author, Katherine Flegal, a senior research scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):

We published an article in 2005 that showed, among other things, that overweight was associated with lower mortality — and we got an awful lot of negative feedback from that… I think there’s a lot of under reporting of this finding, and so people are sort of repeatedly surprised by it.

Of course they would be. We are socially conditioned to believe that fat is not good.

The new research is the largest and most comprehensive review of how weight, measured as body mass index (BMI) – the measure of comparing the ratio of height to weight – influences longevity.

TIME reported:

For the new study, Flegal and her colleagues analysed every study they could find that broke down death risk broken by the standard BMI categories set by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the late 1990’s: with underweight defined as BMI less than 18,5, normal weight being BMI between 18,5 and 25, overweight being BMI between 25 and 30, and obese as BMI of over 30. Men or women who are 5’4” would have “normal” BMI if they weighed between 49kg and 65kg, for example, and overweight if they weighed 66kg to 79kg, and obese if weighed more than that.

Overall, people who were overweight but not obese were 6% less likely to die during the average study period than normal-weight people. That advantage held among both men and women, and did not appear to vary by age, smoking status, or region of the world. The study looked only at how long people lived, however, and not how healthy they were whey they died, or how they rated their quality of life.

You can read more HERE.

Meanwhile, in one area of Britain, overweight people now face the risk of losing some benefits: a council is deciding whether to monitor if overweight people are doing exercise, and penalise them if not.

[Source: TIME]