Bad news for plump baby boomers: One of the biggest studies yet on the
link between excess weight and premature death finds that being even
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
with 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 blamed on excess weight, said Dr. Michael Leitzmann, senior
author of the study, which was published online Tuesday 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. For
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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 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.

CDC spokeswoman declined to discuss the new study, saying it is agency
policy not to comment on non-CDC studies. But she pointed out that the
CDC study had found that in 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 huge group of people who had never
smoked - 180,000 of them - 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 the 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 that 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. In 2004, federal
researchers put that number at 400,000, but then the CDC paper last
year, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association,
revised the number down to 112,000.

Tuesday, 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.

And the study did have two weaknesses, said Aviva Must, an obesity
expert 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 last 20 years of
research into the link between excess weight - even just a little of
it - and premature death.

And 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."

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