Moderately overweight get warning Study sees higher risk of early death By Carey Goldberg Boston Globe August 23, 2006 Bad news for plump baby boomers: One of the biggest studies yet on the link between excess weight and premature death finds that being just moderately overweight in middle age can slightly raise the risk of premature death. The new study contradicts other recent research that had suggested that a little extra fat could act as a protective cushion. Among more than a half-million members of AARP, the group formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, those who were somewhat overweight had a mild, 20 percent to 40 percent increased risk of dying prematurely compared with people of normal weight. Those who were obese doubled or tripled their chances of dying prematurely, the study found. ``This may not be the news a lot of people want to hear, but I think the study provides pretty clear evidence that being overweight is not a benign condition, and we shouldn't be complacent about it," said Dr. Frank Hu of the Harvard School of Public Health, who was not involved in the study. The study adds fuel to the national debate over what should be done about the current obesity epidemic, a food fight that ranges from Congress to local school lunchrooms and has included wrangling over how to calculate the toll that obesity takes on American health. Overall, the study suggests that about 19 percent of premature deaths can be attributed to excess weight, said Dr. Michael Leitzmann , senior author of the study, which was published online yesterday by the New England Journal of Medicine. ``It's a very significant, very critical public health issue," said Leitzmann, an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute. An estimated one-third of American adults are obese, and another third are considered overweight. Someone 5 feet 9 inches tall would fit the medical definition of overweight by weighing between 169 and 202 pounds and obese at 203 pounds or more. The government webpage on defining obesity is at: http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/defining.htm The study's results differ dramatically from findings last year by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers suggesting that, while full-fledged obesity is harmful, being moderately overweight is linked to a drop in premature mortality. A CDC spokeswoman declined to discuss the new study, saying it is agency policy not to comment on non-CDC studies. But she said the CDC study had found that in the year 2000, 112,000 deaths could be attributed to obesity, but there was a shortfall of deaths -- 87,000 fewer than expected -- among people who were moderately overweight. The new study was bigger than the CDC study and also employed new tactics to correct for a central problem that often confounds such research: Smokers and people with chronic disease tend to weigh less, but die sooner. So including them in studies can mask the harmful effects of excess weight, because they skew the thinner groups toward dying sooner. In the new study, which was sponsored and conducted by the National Cancer Institute, researchers had a large group of people who had never smoked -- 180,000 -- and also took care to control for the effects of smokers and the chronically ill. Another strength of the new study: It asked participants for their weight at age 50, before they were likely to develop a chronic disease that could affect their weight, and also followed the weight of participants for as long as a decade. The study did not calculate how many years of life a person is likely to lose by being overweight or obese. But Hu, an associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard, said previous studies have found that being overweight may cost a person a couple of years, and being obese may cost five to seven years. The new research also did not address the recent debate over how many American lives are lost each year to obesity. Yesterday, the new paper was already drawing some criticism. ``Researchers need to stop myopically harping on weight when our health is influenced by so many other factors," said J. Justin Wilson , senior research analyst for the Center for Consumer Freedom, a group funded by the food and restaurant industry. The study did have two weaknesses, said Aviva Must , an obesity specialist at the Tufts School of Medicine. It used participants' own reports of their height and weight, and people tend to claim to be a bit taller and thinner than they really are. Also, other research suggests that an older person's waist-to-hip ratio may be a better indicator of ill health than the Body Mass Index, a measure of weight to height that researchers used in the study. But overall, she said, the study fits neatly into the past 20 years of research into the link between excess weight, even just a little, and premature death. The message, Must said, is one of prevention: ``The time to start thinking about maintaining a healthy weight is when you're a younger person, when it's possible. You don't want to get to age 50 and be facing 40 pounds that are hard to shed."