Obesity Kills More Americans than Previously Estimated, Study Says

Obesity kills more Americans than previously thought, a new study found.

The study was conducted by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and colleagues who found that obesity kills about 1 out of every 5 Americans. Recent estimates suggested that obesity is responsible for about 5 percent of all deaths in the U.S.

The latest study found that actually, about 18 percent of all deaths are related with obesity among people aged between 40 and 85 years.

Obesity can raise risk of chronic conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, stroke, arthritis and even some cancers. According to estimates by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a third of all people living in the U.S are obese.

"Obesity has dramatically worse health consequences than some recent reports have led us to believe. We expect that obesity will be responsible for an increasing share of deaths in the United States and perhaps even lead to declines in U.S. life expectancy," said Ryan Masters, at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, first author of the study,

Even moderate excess weight - about 20 extra pounds for a person of average height- could increase health risks associated with weight. Compared to people of healthy weight, obese people have a 50 to 100 percent higher risk of dying early due to any cause.

The present study was based on mortality data of white men who died when they were 65-70 years old, between 1986 and 2006.

Results showed that obesity was associated with nearly 3.5 percent deaths for people born between 1915 and 1919. The percentage of deaths related with obesity rose to 5 percent for people born between 1925 and 1929. Another ten years later, obesity killed about 7 percent of the people.

Many children and teens in the U.S. are already showing signs of obesity which could lead to health complications in the future.

"A 5-year-old growing up today is living in an environment where obesity is much more the norm than was the case for a 5-year-old a generation or two ago. Drink sizes are bigger, clothes are bigger, and greater numbers of a child's peers are obese.  And once someone is obese, it is very difficult to undo. So it stands to reason that we won't see the worst of the epidemic until the current generation of children grows old," said Bruce Link, PhD, professor of epidemiology and sociomedical sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and co author of the study, according to a new study.

Race and ethnicity were also accounted in the current study. The scientists found that black women were more likely to die early due to obesity than white women (27 percent versus 21 percent). For white men, the risk of dying early due to obesity was about 15 percent while it was 5 percent for black men.

The risk was lower for obese black men because they had other risk factors such as poor socioeconomic conditions and smoking that crowded out the effects of obesity.

The study is published in the American Journal of Public Health.