EFN

According to the online report published in the September online edition of the journal BMJ, researchers from Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital found women who were obese at midlife were almost 80 percent less likely to be healthy at age 70 compared with women who were lean in their 40s and 50s.

The study, the first to examine the effect of obesity on overall health for women who lived through 70, utilized the Nurses’ Health Study, which has gathered information from more than 1,20,000 female RNs living in 11 U.S. states since 1976. Just 10 percent of the women in the study who had lived to age 70 or beyond (their mean age was 50 when the Nurses’ Health Study began) reported being free of the 11 major chronic diseases the researchers tracked, maintaining good mental health and cognitive and physical function.

Adding body weight from the age of 18 until middle age was a predictor of how long women would live in good health, the study said. Compared with lean women who maintained a stable weight, women who were overweight (BMI ≥ 25 kg/m2) at age 18 years and gained 10 kg or more of weight had the lowest odds of healthy survival (OR, 0.18; 95% CI, 0.09 – 0.36).

The primary conclusion of the study is that it is essential to sustain a healthy weight from early adulthood to midlife, in order to have a healthy and long life. Experts consider people with a body max index (BMI) between 19-25 to be healthy, while those from 25 to 30 are considered overweight and those over 30 are obese.