Dying From Fats And Fitlessness

Author’s note: The following article was written about three weeks prior to my last blog. It really should have been published before my last blog (which was only done a couple of hours ago), but I now publish it here for your edification. It lends further weight to the seriousness of an unhealthy diet and lifestyle. It’s not just cardiovascular disease alone; death came from diseases, and in the last blog they also included renal, diabetic, liver, neoplastic (tumor), lung and other diseases.

The importance of physical exercise should never be understated—the same with healthy lifestyle and keeping your weight down.

One study published in Archives of Internal Medicine of 2,316 men with no history of stroke or myocardial infarction concluded this way: Among the men studied who had diabetes, “low fitness level was associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality within normal weight, overweight, and class 1 obese weight categories.” Which in short means, if you have diabetes, the less fit you are, the greater your likelihood of dying from a cardiovascular event.

179 CVD deaths were noted “during a mean (SD) follow-up of 15.9 (7.9) years and 36,710 man-years of exposure.”


Table 1: Relative Hazard Ratio for CVD Deaths Versus Fitness and Weight

Categories: High Fitness, Normal Weight-Low Fitness, Normal Weight-Low Fitness, Overweight-Low Fitness, Obese (Class 1)
Hazard ratio for CVD deaths: 1.0, 1.3-5.7, 1.4-5.1, 1.4-5.1 respectively


I’d like to highlight this here: The above chart indicates that even if you are having normal weight but unfit, your risk of death from CVD is still high compared with someone who is both physically fit and normal weighted.

You can obtain more evidence of the relationship between health and fitness-weight levels from a large prospective study by Jensen et al (published in Circulation. 2008) of over 54 500 men and women. In this study, it was found during follow-up that only 47 cases (4.1%) of acute coronary syndrome (ACS) occurred in the healthy-lifestyle group. This is very low because during a median of 7.7 years, a total of 1,127 incident cases of registered nonfatal or fatal ACS events actually occurred.


Table 2: Relationship between Hazard Ratio for ACS and Fitness-Weight

Categories: Fit and Normal Weight, Fit but Overweight, Fit but Obese (Class 1)
Hazard ratio for Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS): 1.00, 1.65, 2.65 respectively


Jensen and team found that the risk for ACS was significantly higher for the ‘Fit but Obese’ and the ‘Fit but Overweight’ compared with the ‘Fit and Normal-weight’; the risk was respectively 265% and 165% higher.

Jensen et al concluded that “Obesity confers an elevated risk of ACS in both healthy and less healthy subgroups of lifestyle behaviors. Adherence to healthy lifestyle behaviors was associated with a lower risk even among obese individuals.”

The above findings add legitimacy and impetus to the correlations I had drawn up during my own research nearly a decade ago, which was also clearly indicated by my study model from which I drew these conclusions. (You may wish to contact me at info@FocusOnTotalHealth.net for discussion on this matter). The correlation or conclusion I came up with is as follows:


The fatter and more unfit you are, the higher your chance of dying, and the earlier you will die.


Time and time again, various researchers have subsequently shown the first part of my conclusion to be true. However, the latter part calls for more research to further validate it; nevertheless, I had proven beyond the shadow of doubt—and I can demonstrate it scientifically—that this second part of my conclusion also holds true.