Obesity Outweighs Smoking as Life Expectancy Threat

By Crystal Phend, Senior Staff Writer, MedPage Today
Published: December 02, 2009
Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Gains in life expectancy from lower smoking rates over the next decade will be offset, to some degree, by reductions in life expectancy based on the rise in obesity, researchers estimated.

If obesity and smoking rates had held steady, the average 18-year-old would have seen a 2.98-year increase in life expectancy over a 15-year period, according to Susan T. Stewart, PhD, of Harvard and the private nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., and colleagues.

But a 48% rise in obesity overrode the expected gain from a 20% reduction in smoking rates seen over the past 15 years, the researchers reported in the Dec. 3 New England Journal of Medicine. /.../