Obese teens have same risks as smokers

From The NY Times:

Likening obesity’s risks to those of smoking, a large European study spanning decades has found that young men who were overweight at age 18 were as likely to die by 60 as light smokers, while obese teens, like heavy smokers, were at double the risk of dying early.

While obesity is linked to a slew of health problems, the new findings fly in the face of numerous recent studies showing that people who are merely overweight may not be at higher risk of premature death than those of normal weight.

The new study, published in this week’s British Medical Journal, tracked the death rates of 45,920 Swedish men over 38 years. The researchers found that men who were obese when they signed up for service in the Swedish Army in 1969 and 1970 were at more than twice the risk of dying by age 60, compared with those who were of normal weight. That is about the same increase in risk faced by normal-weight recruits who smoked half a pack of cigarettes or more a day.

Recruits who were overweight but did not smoke were about one-third more likely to die prematurely, an increase in risk about the same as that for men of normal weight who smoked up to 10 cigarettes a day, the study found.

“We know that health behaviors are established early on in life,” Martin Neovius, the study’s first author and a postdoctoral fellow at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said in an e-mail interview. He said the message for teenagers today was: “If you already are smoking, then smoking cessation combined with weight-maintenance counseling would probably be a good idea.”

Some experts, however, said that despite the breadth of the new study, the findings might overstate the dangers of being overweight. They pointed out that researchers knew only the weight of the men when they signed up for military service at 18.

And since most people gain weight as they age, the men who were overweight in their teens might well have gone on to become obese as adults, so their deaths might actually reflect the risk of obesity, not of being overweight earlier in life, said Dr. David F. Williamson, a visiting professor at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University who has studied the effects of obesity on health.

Smoking is widely acknowledged to be the single most important cause of preventable deaths and disease, he said.

“It’s fairly dramatic when you say something is as lethal as smoking,” Dr. Williamson said. “We know of very few things from a health perspective that are as lethal as smoking.”