Overview of 97 Overweight Studies

Being slightly overweight may not be as much of a health risk as previously thought. The National Center for Health Statistics has reviewed 97 past studies involving 3 million people. Researchers found that being overweight or slightly obese was linked to about a 6% lower risk of dying, compared to people considered “normal weight”. Researchers say that is in cases of people who are 30 to 35 pounds overweight. Being severely obese was still tied to an almost 30% higher risk of death. Katherine Flegal worked on the study. “Sometimes that surprises people but they really should not be too surprised because in our categories of these 97 studies, 80% of them showed that there was lower mortality in overweight than in normal weight people.” It was a tough report to put together, adds Flegal. “This literature has not been assembled in one place before in any kind of way.  It was very difficult to find all these studies and I’m sure that people are not going to comb through and look for 97 studies.” She tells where most of the study information was gained.  “We had 97 studies; most of them came from North America, the United States or Canada or from Europe and a handful from other parts of the world.” Flegal says the numbers were similar in most of the studies, despite differing circumstances.  “Their findings tend to be very consistent across different ages, across genders and across different parts of the world, so these were strikingly consistent findings.” The overweight study appears in the Journal of The American Medical Association.