Released June 18, 2008
AUBURN UNIVERSITY, Ala. -- It's not yet on par with those of Japan, Switzerland and 30 other countries, but many health experts hail the recent increase in U.S. life expectancy, which now surpasses 78, as a sign that more Americans are taking better care of themselves.
But one nutrition and health expert wonders how long this upward trend in life expectancy will last, considering the chronic levels of obesity among the nation’s youth. Robert Keith, an Alabama Cooperative Extension System nutrition and health specialist and Auburn University professor of nutrition and food science, fears this progress could be stalled and even reversed once many of these children reach adulthood and fall prey to chronic obesity-related diseases.
Currently, some 32 percent of U.S. children are overweight or obese — three times what it was 30 years ago, says Keith.
Data generated by a series of studies are driving home an increasingly compelling case that obesity is a major factor behind premature death and illness among overweight and obese children later in life — something that Keith and other health professionals have suspected for a long time. Studies show these children face a considerably higher risk of death much earlier in life from several chronic, obesity-related diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes.
For example, a study conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health, published in the July 18, 2006 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that being overweight at age 18 is associated with an increased risk of premature death in younger and middle-aged women.
A more recent study by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health revealed that people who already were overweight between the ages of 14 to 19 years faced an increased mortality rate from a range of chronic diseases as adults.
“Researchers involved with these studies are seeing significantly greater mortality and disease among these people even as early as their fifties,” Keith says, adding that the findings from these studies hold serious implications not only for those directly affected but also for their families and the U.S. health care system.
“It’s going to pose tremendous strains on family members caring for these relatives comparatively early in life and also for the nation’s health care system, which already has been adversely affected by rising obesity rates,” he says.
Keith says the studies also have major implications for the steady progress in U.S. life expectancy.
“This life expectancy has been steadily moving up, but this undercurrent of obesity may flatten this out and even drag it down in the years to come,” he says.
If this turns out to be the case, Keith says a kind of dichotomy may arise in coming years — one in which a growing number of more health-conscious Americans live well into their 90s and even past 100, while others succumb to obesity-related diseases much earlier in life.
“As it turns out, the median age of life expectancy, whether it rises, falls, or levels off in the years to come, may turn out to be an empty number not really reflecting what is happening in the general population,” Keith says. “We may have one segment of the U.S. population living to be much older while another segment dies at a much younger age.”
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http://www.aces.edu/department/extcomm/npa/daily/archives/003661.php
Contact: Jim Langcuster, (334) 844-5686
