Being obese at 50 gives you the health of a 75-year-old

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Research show that obese 55-year-olds are more likely to suffer from the same health problems as people 20 years older but not overweight.

It was found that that just under 20 percent of 115,000 Finns with a healthy weight suffered from two diseases by the age of 75. But among obese people, this proportion was reached at 55 years. Similar results were observed in a group of 500,000 British adults.

Researchers from Helsinki and University College London said:

“Compared to people with a healthy weight, obese people have five-fold increased risk of simple multimorbidity and more than 12-fold increased risk of complex multimorbidity.”

Simple multimorbidity is two or more conditions, and complex multimorbidity is four or more. But the results showed that the effect of obesity on mortality is not so noticeable, so overweight people live with diseases, rather than dying early.