Obesity Linked to Wasted Time and Early Death

Two studies on obesity shed light on the obvious: the condition is "life-draining", and can result in early death.

In July 2006, the AMA reported the findings from a group of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh. This team looked at more than 90,000 ethnically-diverse U.S. women with equally diverse backgrounds in health and followed them for seven years.

The conclusion? "The health risks of women who are extremely obese may have been underestimated."

"Overall, extremely obese women were more likely to die over the average seven years of follow-up than were women in other examined weight categories."

What was not covered adequately—the pain factor. The physical and emotional pain of obesity is something I know all too well.

Obesity affects the health and longevity of males and females alike. This is no longer in question. What remains in question is what we as a nation are going to do about it.

Also in question is the years of life obesity can steal while we're still above ground. Simply slowing down our pace and draining our energy is enough to shave years off of our life-span.

A student-funded collegiate study from Abilene Christian University in 1989 demonstrated that obesity slows our walking pace down by 235% of what is considered healthy. This was analyzed by measuring the time required to get to and from the car when grocery shopping.

The average pace for a fit individual, parked twenty-five yards away (a good average distance), was under a minute. For obese individuals, this time skyrocketed to almost three minutes.

This alone shaved almost half a year off the lives of the test subjects. This was based on being obese for 20 years and shopping only two times weekly. This was the aggregate time spent simply "going slower".

In reality, this is not taking minutes away from our lives, but it is most certainly wasting minutes we could be using in more productive activities. And, this is just one of hundreds of daily tasks to consider.

What would the grand total be of "wasted energy" over a period of twenty years?

Studies can only look a raw data. However, our common sense should be added to this data to draw our ultimate conclusions.