A new study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine reveals that aerobic fitness plays a more significant role in longevity than body mass index. The research, the largest and most comprehensive to date on the relationship between fitness, weight, and lifespan, found that being out of shape nearly tripled the risk of premature death, regardless of BMI. Conversely, individuals with obesity who maintained a high level of aerobic fitness had a significantly lower risk of early death compared to those with normal weight but low fitness.
According to a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, people can be healthy and long-lived at any weight, if they are also active and fit. That’s the conclusion of the largest, most comprehensive study yet of the relationship between aerobic fitness, body mass index and longevity. A review and analysis of reams of earlier research, it found that being out of shape doubled or tripled the risk of dying prematurely, whatever someone’s age or body mass index.
The study, published in November in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, adds to the growing research that people can be healthy and long-lived at any weight, if they are also active and fit. That message may be especially timely now, as New Year’s resolutions are in full swing, since the findings suggest even a little exercise could be enough to improve our fitness and drop our mortality risk, whether we gained pounds in the last year or not.
But many of these past studies involved somewhat small groups of people, the bulk of them men and Americans, and the research’s definitions of “fitness” often relied on subjective data, such as people’s memories of how much they’d exercised recently.
But poor fitness had its own hazards. In fact, people of normal weight who landed in the bottom 20 percent of fitness were about twice as likely to have died young as people with obesity who qualified as fit. The study also suggests requires little effort to move from being unfit to fit. Someone in the bottom 20 percent of fitness for his or her age just needs to exercise enough to rise into the 21st percentile of fitness, Angadi said.
AEROBIC FITNESS BMI LONGEVITY MORTALITY RISK EXERCISE
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