How Can Gaining Weight Help People Live a Longer Life?

A new study reveals that starting adulthood at a normal weight and slowly adding up pounds could give people longer life.

Researchers from Ohio State University analyzed data from two generations of people from Framingham, Massachusetts, between ages 31 to 80. They found that those who started in normal weight in adulthood and became overweight, but not obese, later in life tend to live longer.

Surprisingly, these people lived longer than those who have a normal weight throughout their lives and those who continued to be obese and continued to add weight in later years.

However, it is worrying that the present generation is overweight and sooner become obese in their later lives than their parents. The study also found that these people are predicted to be more likely to die from increasing obesity.

Overweight People Tend to Live Longer

WebMD once reported in 2009 that overweight people tend to live longer than those who are underweight, obese, and even those who have normal weight. This year, another evidence supported this claim.

This phenomenon is known as the obesity paradox, although only a few studies linked obesity to having a longer life. Rather, studies generally suggest that people with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 25 to 29.9, who are considered overweight, have a survival advantage compared to those with lower or higher BMI.

The 2009 study surveyed 11,000 adults between the mid-1990s to 2007 and found that those classified as underweight were 73% more likely to die, while those extremely obese with 35 and above BMI have 36% more chance of dying, and those obese people with a BMI of 30-34.9 have about the same risk.

Surprisingly, those overweight people have 17% less likely to die.

ALSO READ: Age Doesn't Matter When It Comes to Losing Weight, Study

Starting With Normal Weight And Gaining Weight Over Time Increases Survival Rate

The 2009 study results seemed to be similar to the new study from the researchers at Ohio State University. Study author Hui Zheng said that the impact of weight gain on the survival rate is complex as it depends on the timing and magnitude of weight gain and where the BMI started.

MailOnline reported that the new study claims that those who start at a normal weight in early adulthood and gain a modest amount of weight throughout their lives and become overweight later adulthood can increase their survival rate.

The researchers followed two generations of participants who were between the age of 31 and 80 years old. They found that the older generation generally followed the seven trajectories of BMI throughout their lives. However, the younger generation had six trajectories.

That means there were not enough people in their generation who lost their weight throughout their lives to have a downward slope of weight trajectory compared to their parents' generation.

The researchers computed how each BMI trajectory was related to mortality and discovered that both generations showed similar results. Those who started at a normal weight and moved to be overweight but not obese were most likely to live longer.

Meanwhile, those who stayed at normal weight throughout their life were the next to most likely to survive, followed by those overweight but maintained their weight, and then next are those who were at the lower level of normal weight.

On the other hand, those in the older generation who were overweight and lost weight came next. While the least to survive are those who started to be obese and continued to gain weight.

But experts are worried that today's younger generation is becoming obese at an earlier age than their parent's generation. Even though obese people are more likely to survive today than in the past, the researchers said that they still increased the population deaths from 5.4% in the original cohort to 6.4% in the offspring cohort.