HHS HealthBeat (November 23, 2007)

Weight, sickness and death

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Being overweight is bad for you. It carries a higher risk of diabetes and heart disease, for instance. But will it kill you?

That’s where things get complicated.

Researcher Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says overweight does raise the risk of dying of diabetes, but not of dying of heart disease or cancer.  In fact:

``About 40 percent of deaths in the U.S. population are due to causes that are neither cancer nor cardiovascular disease, and there we found that overweight was associated with a significantly reduced number of deaths from those causes.’’ (11 seconds)

However, being obese does raise the death risk, from forms of cancer and heart disease. 

The reasons for the differences are not clear.

The study was in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Learn more at hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: May, 26 2008