India Health & Wellness blog

For teens, obesity as bad as chain smoking

26th February, 2009 - Posted by admin -

Obese teenage boys are as likely to die young as peers who smoke more than half a pack of cigarettes a day, a Swedish study found. Obesity or 

heavy smoking each more than doubled the risk of premature death in a survey of more than 45,000 Swedish men in their late teens, Karolinska Institute researchers said on Wednesday. 

“The normal-weight heavy smokers and the non-smoking obese individuals have exactly the same risk,” lead author Martin Neovius, an assistant professor at the Stockholm- based institute, said. “The risk of obesity at this age is comparable to smoking more than 10 cigarettes a day”, he added. Data came from military records from Swedish men born from 1949 to 1951 who took physicals after being drafted at about