A new study by Ohio State University suggests that adults who are born with a normal body mass index (BMI) and then slowly gain weight throughout their lives but aren’t obese are more likely to live longer than typical people who are overweight and obese.
The researchers employed BMI, which is a general standard of measurement, to classify a person as normal weight, underweight, overweight, or obese.
BMI is a measurement, or indicator, that is based on the person’s weight and height to Slowly define an individual.
The study was completed by two generations of participants of the Framingham Heart Study, which tracked the medical histories of residents of one town in Massachusetts along with their families for many years.
The study was carried out with large numbers of participants, namely 4,756 people and their children of 3,753, from The Framingham Heart Study’s first group.
The study began in 1948 and continued to follow participants up to the year 2010. Children of participants were monitored from 1971 until 2014.
The participants in the original cohort had all passed away after the study. Therefore, these results will help to understand the way BMI changes throughout the years of adulthood. It will also provide more accurate estimates than previous studies that have examined how obesity can be linked to death.
Adults who enter adulthood obese and then continue to gain weight have the highest death rate.
The study highlighted some alarming signs for the young generation. Teenagers who are obese and overweight at an older age are more likely to suffer deaths due to obesity that are linked to the increase in weight.
The lead author of the study, as well as a sociology professor in The Ohio State University, said, “The impact of weight growth on mortality is complicated. It is dependent on the time and magnitude of weight gain as well as where the BMI began.”
“The main message is that for those who start at a normal weight in early adulthood, gaining a modest amount of weight throughout life and entering the overweight category in later adulthood can increase the probability of survival.” Further.
The researcher examined data from 31 to 80 across both generations. The primary measurement was BMI.
After taking the data into account and analyzing the data, the researcher discovered that people who had a normal weight but then grew into being overweight later in their lives, but never obese, were more likely to make it through.
Then there are those who keep their BMI constant throughout their lives. Then those who were obese and then shed the excess weight were next, mostly the older generations.
There’s a challenge for the younger generations in the study.
“Even though the mortality risks associated with obesity trajectories have decreased across the generations, their contributions to population deaths increased from 5.4% in the original cohort to 6.4% in the offspring cohort,”.
