Effect of Obesity on Life Expectancy in the U.S.

In an article recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine (Olshansky et al., 2005), we predicted that the steady rise in life expectancy in the United States in this century may soon come to an end because younger people today are far less healthy than previous cohorts of younger people.

We estimated that if obesity did not exist in the U.S. today, life expectancy at birth would be higher by approximately 4–9 months. We further estimated that if the observed relationship between obe…