Obese Smokers Can Age By Ten Years

OBESITY can speed up the ageing process as much as heavy smoking, new research revealed yesterday.

Scientists found that being grossly overweight can age a person by almost nine years, while people who smoke regularly add more than seven years to their biological age. Fat people who smoke add ten years or more to their age.

Such accelerated ageing greatly increases the risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Doctors said the research highlighted the danger of both smoking and fatty foods.

But while smoking is being addressed through aggressive public health measures such as the Scottish Executive’s proposed smoking ban, obesity is still on the rise. In Scotland almost two-thirds of men and more than half of women are either overweight or obese.

Doctors warned that obesity will soon take over from smoking as public health enemy number one and called for more healthy eating and exercise initiatives.

Professor Tim Spector, of St Thomas’s Hospital, London, who led the study, said: “Our findings suggest that obesity and cigarettes accelerate human ageing.”

The research focused on telomeres or “chromosomal clocks”, the caps on chromosomes that protect the DNA strands from fraying. As a person ages, the telomeres shorten, damaging the DNA.

Prof Spector compared telomere length from blood samples of 1,122 women aged between 18 and 76.

The research, published in the Lancet, found a decrease in telomere length that corresponded to the how obese women were and the amount of cigarettes they had smoked.

Women who smoked at any time in their lives had on average an extra 4.6 years reduction in telomere length. Those who smoked 20 cigarettes a day for 40 years, or 40 for half that time, added an extra 7.4 years to their biological age.

Being obese corresponded to 8.8 extra years of ageing, and obesity and smoking together at least ten years.

Prof Spector said the research proved that obesity and smoking can not only hasten death but also reduce the quality of life at any age. “Every cigarette smoker knows they’re going to die early. The new message is it’s not only your heart or lung cancer that’s going to get you, it’s your whole body that’s being damaged. Your chromosomal clock is going faster.”

Dr Ian Banks, the president of the Men’s Health Forum, said obesity has overtaken smoking as public health enemy number one, with three-quarters of men and two-thirds of women expected to be overweight by 2010.

But despite the increased risks of diseases such as cancer, heart disease and stroke, Dr Banks said the dangers of obesity were still not as well known as the risk of smoking. “People think you have to look like Mr Blobby before you get into danger,” he said.”A 40in waist does not look that big on a man, but that is when you get into the danger zone.”

Dr David Haslam, the chairman of the National Obesity Forum,

called for increased public awareness on the scale of the no- smoking message to address the problem.

“The good news is it is possible to make a big difference by going on a diet and taking exercise,” he said.