Health Experts have long warned of the risk of obesity, but a new Japanese study warns that being very skinny is even more dangerous, and that slightly chubby people live longer.
People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.
“We found skinny people run the highest risk,” said Shinichi Kuriyama, an associate professor at Tohoku University’s Graduate School of Medicine who worked on the long-term study of middle-aged and elderly people.
“There had been an argument that thin people’s lives are short because many of them are sick or smoke. But the difference was almost unchanged even when we eliminated these factors,” Kuriyama said.
Main reasons for the shorter lifespans of skinny people were believed to include their heightened vulnerability to diseases such as pneumonia and the fragility of their blood vessels, he said.
But Kuriyama warned he was not recommending people eat as much as they want.
“It’s better that thin people try to gain normal weight, but we doubt it’s good for people of normal physique to put on more fat,” he said.