September 30, 2009 - 1 comments
The study has revealed that the weight of a woman in her middle age is inversely proportionate to her life expectancy in old age. The difference can be as glaring as 80 percent.
According to the online paper released by British Medical Journal (BMJ), around 17,000 female nurses were kept under field observation from when they were 50 years of age, on an average, till they reached their 70s. Beginning in 1976, their health along with their weight was checked every two years.
Their chances of “healthy survival”, that is, complete absence of history of any 11 major chronic diseases, or mental problems, and significant physical decline -- for example, not being able to climb a flight of stairs, and buy groceries -- reduced rapidly as their weight increased.
"Those who gained weight (in adulthood) actually suffered reduced odds of healthy survival," said study author Dr. Qi Sun, a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health's department of nutrition.
"The key message is that women really need to keep a healthy weight from early adulthood to midlife to enjoy a healthy and long life," he added.
According to Sun, this study is novel and significant because previous ones have focused on how excess weight reduces the chances of survival, not about the quality of that survival.
Every kg counts
According to general consensus, people with the Body Mass Index (BMI) between 19-25 are supposed to be healthy, between 25-30 are considered overweight, and above that are called seriously obese.
After the age of 18, every extra kilo gram put on by a woman reduces her odds to survive past 70 by 5 percent. Also, an already overweight woman at 18 who puts on around 10 kgs more had no more that 20 percent chance of survival till the age of 70.
“People may think they can safely gain weight through their 20s, 30s and 40s, but there is no evidence that gaining weight is natural," said Aviva Must, professor and chair of the public health and community medicine department at Tufts University School of Medicine.
The advances of medical science to increase the life expectancy in general fall flat in the face of conditions like chronic obesity.
Weight in teenage bad for old age
Being overweight increases one’s chances of getting cancer
, diabetes, and other heart ailments. Apart from that, diseases like depression, hypertension etc. have also been consistently associated with being overweight.
"We typically see this struggle not only in middle age but even as teenagers. If you struggle as a teenager, you're going to struggle for the rest of your life," said Eugenio Lopez, a registered nurse with the Texas A&M Health Science Center Coastal Bend Health Education Center in Corpus Christi.
Women constitute the high risk group as it has been seen that they are more frequent in the diabetes and hypertension groups.
“We know we're extending life span, but we don't know if we're extending healthy survival," Must said. "If one is going to spend the last three decades of one's life with compromised physical and mental function, that may not be the picture of aging we have when we think of living into our 90s."
Topic : Obesity.
I personally recognize that wheat is a far better diet than meat on the ground it usually goes out of body with ease and rapidity, and we are well aware that our heath depends upon smooth metabolism and blood stream associated with the immune system
and how important our daily workout is, as well.
I still think the critical conditions mostly come from breach of our immune system, and the food that stays long in the body is more likely to become a source where germs, bacterias and the like multiply.
Sounds outlandish, but wheat might be a principal "clean and healthy" food that has led western society to the most decent culture of all.
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