Being overweight boosts the risk of dying from diabetes and kidney disease but not cancer or heart disease, and carrying some extra pounds appears actually to protect against a host of other causes of death, federal researchers reported on Tuesday.The counter-intuitive findings, based on a detailed analysis of decades of government data about more than 39,000 Americans, suggest that being overweight does carry risks, but the dangers may be less dire than experts thought.“The take-home message is that the relationship between fat and mortality is more complicated than we tend to think," said Katherine Flegal, a senior research scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, who led the study. "It's not a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all situation where excess weight just increases your mortality risk for any and all causes of death.”The study, publishedin the Journal of the American Medical Association, was greeted with sharply mixed reactions. Some praised it for providing persuasive evidence that the dangers of fat have been overblown.“What this tells us is the hazards have been very much exaggerated," said Steven Blair, a professor of exercise science, epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of South Carolina. “It’s just not as big a problem as people have said.”But others dismissed the findings as fundamentally flawed, saying an overwhelming body of evidence has documented the risks of being either overweight or obese.“It's just rubbish," said Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. “It’s just ludicrous to say there is no increased risk of mortality from being overweight. . From a health standpoint, it's definitely undesirable to be overweight.”The proportion of flabby Americans has been rising steadily, and two-thirds are now classified as overweight, including about one-third who have put on so many pounds they qualify as obese. The trend has triggered widespread warnings of an impending epidemic of diabetes, heart, disease, cancer and other ailments.
