Health Study On Aging Gets Heavy, Says Staying Slim Is The Way To Go Some Reports Contend That It’s Ok To Gain A Bit Of Poundage With Age, But Experts Now Say Letting Out Your Belt Is Risky

Getting older long has been an excuse for gaining weight, and some research has suggested that people who start out trim in their 20s can add 6 to 7 pounds for each passing decade and stay in the best of health.

But a new study of 324,000 men and women has found no health advantage in being heavier with age - at least for people under 75. Anyone younger than that who is substantially overweight may have two to three times as high a risk of dying as thinner people of the same age.

“I’m sorry to tell you, it’s a very lean weight that’s associated with the best survival rate” across all age groups except the elderly, said June Stevens, associate professor of nutrition at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

“Most people gain weight as they get older,” said Stevens, lead author of the study in the current New England Journal of Medicine. “Wouldn’t it be nice if it was OK? It just didn’t turn out that way.”

The report is the latest in a round of studies looking at the association between age, weight and death rates, adding fuel to an ongoing debate over whether weight tables and fitness guidelines should allow higher poundage for older people.

In the 1980s, a widely cited and influential study involving actuarial data from 4 million life insurance customers found that the healthiest people were those whose body weight increased with each decade of life. That prompted the U.S. Department of Agriculture to change its dietary guidelines in 1990, allowing higher weights for older people.

But that study included smokers, who tend to be leaner but sicker than nonsmokers, skewing the results in favor of weight gain with age.

In 1995, the USDA went back to guidelines listing only one desirable weight range for all adult age groups, after other studies found that even moderate weight gain with age led to higher death rates.

Because the report includes only white men and women who had never smoked and had not been diagnosed with such major illness as heart disease at the start of the study, Stevens said that the results are only directly applicable to that population, and may not be generalized to everyone.

Dr. Reubin Andres, one of the authors of that influential 1980s study, said there have been many contradictory studies on the topic, and the one published this week does not settle the question.

“We just put this down along with the other 75 or 100 studies on this particular topic and say, ‘Well, here’s one, it’s a big one, you have to pay attention to it.’ And it ain’t perfect either, as the authors know,” said Andres, chief of the metabolism section for the National Institute on Aging, who has reviewed the study.