Obesity And Life Expectancy
SFGate reports that obesity is bad for you: as bad as the average risk of cancer, as studies of life expectancy show. It is important to note that life expectancy is a statistical measure; it is not a prediction of future longevity, and is only useful for these sorts of comparisons of the relative risks of lifestyle and disease. Here, for example, the life expectancy calculations assume increasing rates of obesity but no advances in medical technology - obviously not the case in the real world, but very helpful when trying to tease out the effect of obesity on healthy life span from the data. The weight of scientific evidence strongly suggests that excess fat greatly increases the risk of age-related disease and reduces life span - so take action accordingly.
Link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/17/OBESITY.TMP&type=health