Dr. Steven Grover, epidemiologist from McGill University (Montreal) and his team have developed a simulation model to estimate the risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease and early mortality for people with a body mass index (BMI) 25-30 (overweight), 30 and 35 (obesity), or 35 and over (severe obesity), compared to an ideal BMI of 18.5 and 25. They used the US health database (the “NHANES” 2003-2010) and medical data from 3992 participants.
Obesity alters the quality of life and reduces life expectancy
The results of the study show that overweight people lose between 0 and 3 years of life expectancy. The obese reduce their life by 1 to 6 years and the very obese by 1 to 8 years. And the younger the overweight an individual, the greater the health effects. In fact, the people most at risk are young people from 20 to 29 years old. In addition, this pathology would lose 19 years of healthy life.
Now theobesity and being overweight are the risk factors for early mortality that increase the most. They cause type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol. With more than 3 million deaths per year, they move to 6th place in the ranking of health risk factors in the world. Yet obesity is said to have become the new norm in body size. The World Health Organization has warned European governments about the prevalence of obesity in different EU countries. In a report, the WHO says Europeans are getting bigger and bigger: 27% of 13-year-olds and 33% of 11-year-olds are overweight. Obesity would even become the new weight norm in a majority of countries on the old continent. The number of cases of obesity has doubled since 1980. Overweight affects 1.4 billion people aged 20 and over, of which more than 200 million men and nearly 300 million women are obese.
Read also:
Extreme obesity is more dangerous than smoking
Obesity soon to be classified as a handicap by the European Union?
Obesity increases female infertility
