By michael - January, 30th 2014

 

Being overweight boosts the risk of dying from diabetes and kidney disease but not cancer or heart disease, and carrying some extra pounds actually appears to protect against a host of other causes of death, federal researchers reported yesterday.

The counterintuitive findings, based on a detailed analysis of decades of government data about more than 39,000 Americans, supports the conclusions of a study the same group did two years ago that suggested the dangers of being overweight may be less dire than experts thought.

“The take-home message is that the relationship between fat and mortality is more complicated than we tend to think,” said Katherine M. Flegal, a senior research scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, who led the study. “It's not a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all situation, where excess weight just increases your mortality risk for any and all causes of death.”

The study, published today in the …

On one hand, said obesity experts not involved with the research, the findings suggest that the current widespread use of BMI as a way to determine if one is overweight or obese may need to be reconsidered. Flegal said that the problem may not be the BMI scale, but, rather, how the different rungs on the BMI ladder are interpreted by doctors. In this way, such research may have implications for physicians who currently advise patients in the overweight BMI category to lose a few pounds.

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