Fit and Fat Beats Lean and Lazy in Survival

Your fitness level, not your body shape, carries more weight in staying healthy.

ByABC News
January 8, 2009, 1:42 AM

Dec. 4, 2007— -- Fitness may actually be a more important factor than your weight when it comes to living a long, healthy life, a new study suggests.

Researchers report that older people who are fit -- even if they are also fat -- are likely to live longer compared with those who are out of shape. The study is the latest research to suggest that being a bit overweight may not be as dangerous to your health as other factors.

A November Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study suggested that being up to 25 pounds overweight doesn't appear to raise the risk of dying from cancer or heart disease. And a Duke University study in July posed a puzzling -- and controversial -- paradox in which obese people who'd endured a heart attack appeared to have a better chance of surviving it than their skinnier counterparts.

However, medical experts warn that you shouldn't ignore your body mass index completely; instead, they recommend using fitness as a means for maintaining a healthy body weight.

"Our results showed pretty clearly that fitness provides substantial protection against dying," says study author Steven Blair of the University of South Carolina at Columbia, who is also the director of research at the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas. "Even people who are obese, with a body mass index of 35 or higher, if they are fit, they have a much lower chance of dying than those who are unfit."

Blair and colleagues looked at 2,603 adults over age 60 and evaluated their fitness levels using treadmill tests. Their findings, to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggest that weight isn't everything.

Other medical experts not affiliated with the research agree with this conclusion.

"Performance measures are always better than appearance measures in anything," says Dr. Paul Thompson, director of cardiology at the Hartford Hospital and a professor of medicine at the University of Connecticut. "What something looks like does not tell you how it runs."

Blair concurs. "There is a great benefit to being fit," he says, "even if you are in fact obese."