CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Forget everything you thought you knew about weight and health. A head-turning study suggests that being physically fit might matter more than how much you weigh when it comes to your risk of dying from heart disease or other causes.
A team led by researchers from the University of Virginia has turned traditional wisdom about health on its head, finding that people who are overweight or obese but physically fit have essentially the same risk of death as those at a “normal” weight.
The real killer? Being unfit, regardless of body size.
This comprehensive analysis, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, examined nearly 400,000 individuals and found that people who were out of shape faced a dramatically higher risk of death – being roughly two to three times more likely to die from cardiovascular disease or other causes compared to their physically fit counterparts.
“Fitness, it turns out, is far more important than fatness when it comes to mortality risk,” says Siddhartha Angadi, an associate professor of exercise physiology at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, in a media release.
“Exercise is more than just a way to expend calories. It is excellent ‘medicine’ to optimize overall health and can largely reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause death for people of all sizes.”
