[Vision2020] Health: Persoanl Responsibility Factors

[Art Deco]

Part of the the costs of health care appear to be weight related.  In my opinion not enough attention/insistence on personal responsibility has enetered the debate.  The article below contains findings that show the importance of taking responsibility for part of one's overall health.  There are many other findings relating diet and exercise to overall health and consequently to the cost to all of us for health care.

Wayne A. Fox
1009 Karen Lane
PO Box 9421
Moscow, ID  83843

waf at moscow.com
208 882-7975
_____________________________________________
Study warns against extra pounds


Even slightly excessive body weight carries risks 

By Stephanie Nano 

Associated Press 

NEW YORK – Lugging around a few extra pounds? One of the largest studies to look at health and weight finds that you don’t have to be obese to raise your risk of premature death. Merely being overweight carries some risk, too. Obesity increases the risk of death from heart disease, stroke and certain cancers. But whether being merely overweight contributes to an early death as well has been uncertain and controversial. Some research has suggested being a little pudgy has little effect or can even be a good thing.

The latest research involving about 1.5 million people concluded that healthy white adults who were overweight were 13 percent more likely to die during the time they were followed in the study than those whose weight is in an ideal range.

The study’s conclusions, published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine, are similar to three other large studies, said the lead author, Amy Berrington of the National Cancer Institute.

“Now there’s really a very large body of evidence which supports the finding that being overweight is associated with a small increased risk of death,” she said.

For their government-funded analysis, the researchers pooled 19 long-term studies of mostly white adults. They used each person’s body mass index – a measure of height and weight – and checked to see who died during the followup periods, which ranged from five to 28 years.

They focused on people who were healthy at the beginning of the studies, excluding smokers and those with heart disease or cancer because those affect death rates and researchers wanted to see the impact of weight alone.

The lowest death rate for healthy women who had never smoked was in the high end of the ideal body mass index range – between 22.5 and 24.9. Compared with that group, those who were overweight had an increased risk of death of 13 percent. The increased risk ranged from 44 to 88 percent for those who were obese. The morbidly obese were 2 1⁄2 

times more likely to die prematurely. The results for men were similar.

Two-thirds of U.S. adults are either overweight or obese. Overweight begins at a BMI measurement of 25, obese at 30 and morbidly obese at 40. A 5-foot-6 person is considered overweight at 155 pounds, obese at 186 pounds and morbidly obese at 248 pounds.



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