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Obesity has started
to erode the gains Americans have made in extending their
life spans and will stall the long trend toward increasing
longevity unless the nation takes aggressive steps to slim
down, researchers said yesterday.
Illnesses caused by
obesity are already shortening the average U.S. life by at
least four to nine months -- greater than the impact of car
accidents, homicides and suicides combined -- a
first-of-its-kind analysis has determined.
Within 50 years, if
the trend is not reversed, obesity will cut the average life
span by at least two to five years, which would exceed the
effects of all cancers, the researchers estimated. That
could overtake all gains from healthier lifestyles and
medical advances and cause longevity to plateau or perhaps
decline, they projected.
Except for major
catastrophes such as famines, wars and pandemics, the life
span of the average American has been increasing steadily
for the past two centuries, reaching an all-time high of
77.6 years in 2003, the most recent data show.
"The take-home
message is that obesity clearly needs to be considered in an
entirely new light -- it is far more dangerous than we ever
thought," said S. Jay Olshansky, a University of Illinois
demographer who led the study in today's New England Journal
of Medicine. Several other researchers agreed, saying the
finding that obesity is actually undermining longevity
should be a wake-up call.
"These results are
stunning and reinforce the enormous toll that obesity is
taking on the health and happiness of the population," said
Kelly D. Brownell, who directs the Center on Food Policy and
Obesity at Yale University.
Other researchers,
however, said the underlying assumptions were excessively
pessimistic. The study assumed, for example, that everyone
who is overweight will suffer health problems.
"I don't think this
is based on solid, scientific ground," said Glenn A. Gaesser,
a professor of physiology at the University of Virginia who
frequently questions the impact of obesity. "It's
nonsensical, really."
But the researchers
said their estimates were conservative in several ways,
including the fact that they focused exclusively on adults.
The true impact is likely to be much greater as obese
children age and begin suffering elevated rates of diabetes,
heart disease and cancer, they said.
"It's sort of like a massive tsunami heading towards the
shoreline," said David S. Ludwig, an obesity expert at
Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital in Boston who
worked with Olshansky. "It's going to peak in a massive
public health crisis."
At
least two-thirds of Americans are now
overweight, including about one-third
who are obese.
Obesity significantly increases the risk
of a host of serious health problems,
including cancer, heart disease and
diabetes.
The researchers calculated how much
longer Americans would be living if
obesity did not exist, using data from a
large federal assessment of obesity
rates and estimates of the health impact
of obesity by the University of Alabama
at Birmingham School of Public Health
and the National Center for Health
Statistics.
If obesity were magically eliminated,
the overall life span would be at least
one-third to three-quarters of a year
longer, they found.
Minorities would be most affected
because they are more prone to obesity
and tend to get lower-quality health
care, the researchers found.
"Unless we do something, today's younger
generation will, for the first time in
the modern era, experience shorter and
less healthy lives than their parents,"
Olshansky said.
Ironically, that could ease the pressure
on the Social Security system, the
researchers said.
"The U.S. population may be
inadvertently saving Social Security by
becoming more obese," they wrote, "but
the price to be paid by obese people
themselves and the economy is already
high enough to justify considerably
increased spending on public health
interventions aimed at reducing the
incidence and severity of obesity."
In an
accompanying editorial, demographer
Samuel H. Preston of the University of
Pennsylvania said that although some of
the study's assumptions may be
"excessively gloomy," he agreed that the
"rising prevalence and severity of
obesity are capable of offsetting the
array of positive influences on
longevity."
