Weight and Aging: a Paradox, Part 2

The paradox: In animal models there is a consistent relationship between eating less and living longer. But studies in humans find that people who are a little overweight live longest.

Last week, I introduced this paradox and offered evidence, both that lab animals live longer when they are underfed, and that humans live longer when they are overfed. In the article below, I introduce nuances and confounding factors, but in my opinion, the paradox remains unresolved.

BMI

BMI is an imperfect measure of how fat or thin someone is for his height. That’s because it is calculated with the square of height, but body volume (for a given shape) is proportional to the cube of height. The result is that tall people will have a higher BMI than shorter people with equivalent proportions of body fat. For example, BMI=20 for a person 5 feet tall means a weight of 102 pounds, an average weight for that height; whereas BMI=20 for a person 6 feet tall means a weight of 147, which is borderline emaciated.

Short people tend to live significantly longer than tall people, and the effect is substantial.  Males under 5’7” live 7½  years longer than males over 6’ [ref]. This fits with the fact that short people tend to have less growth hormone in their youth. There is a genetic variant in parts of Ecuador that prevents growth hormone from transforming to IGF1 (Laron dwarfism); these people are generally about 4 feet tall and tend to live longer. From domesticated animals, we also know that small dogs live longer than large dogs, small horses longer than large horses. Between species, larger animals live longer, but within a single species, smaller animals live longer.

The height association deepens the weight paradox, because short people will tend to have a lower BMI, which we would expect to skew the association of BMI with longevity downward.

Growth Hormone and IGF1

Growth hormone (which is translated into IGF1 in the body) is genetically associated with shorter lifespan, but we have more of it when we’re young and it promotes a body type with more muscle, less fat. According to this Japanese study, IGF1 increases with weight for people who are thin, but decreases with weight for people who are fat. So maximum longevity is close to maximum IGF1.

Here are some partial explanations for the paradox.

Most variation in weight is explained by genetics, not food intake. The explanation I have proposed in the past is that the CR effect is about food intake, not genetics. And people who are congenitally stout are more likely to be restricting their calories. CR humans are not necessarily especially thin.

The CR effect is proportionately smaller in long-lived humans than in short-lived rodents or shorter-lived worms and flies. [ref] If life extension via CR evolved to help an animal survive a famine, then it seems reasonable that the benefit should be limited to a few years, because that is as long as most famines in nature are likely to last.

The CR effect may be due to intermittent fasting rather than total calorie intake. Traditional CR experiments conflate intermittent fasting with overall calorie reduction, because food is provided in a single daily feeding, and hungry rodents gobble it up, then go hungry for almost 24 hours. More recent experiments attempt to separate the effect of limited-time eating from the effect of calorie reduction, and the general conclusion is that both benefit longevity. It may be that humans who are skinny tend to graze all day, while people with a comfortable amount of fat more easily go for hours at a time without eating. 

Mice carry less fat, have less food craving, and have better gut microbiota if they are fed at night rather than during the day [ref]. Mice are active nocturnally; so translating to humans, it probably means that we should eat in the morning. Conventional wisdom is that eating earlier in the day is better for weight loss and health [ref], but I know of no human data on mortality or life span. This classic study in mice [1986] found caloric restriction itself was the only thing affecting lifespan, and there was no difference whether the mice were fed night or day, in three feedings or one.

Smokers tend to be thinner than non-smokers, but they don’t live longer for reasons that have to do with smoking, not weightSo this is a partial explanation why heavier BMI might be associated with longer lifespan. But note that the recent Zheng’s Ohio State study claimed there was no change in the best weight for longevity when correction was introduced for smoking.

Cachexia is a “wasting” disorder that causes extreme weight loss and muscle atrophy, and can include loss of body fat. This syndrome affects people who are in the late stages of serious diseases like cancer, HIV or AIDS, COPD, kidney disease, and congestive heart failure (CHF). [healthline.com] If cachexia subjects are not removed from a sample, it can strongly bias against weight loss, because once cachexia sets in, life expectancy is very short. But the Zheng study was based on Framingham data, collected annually over the latter half of a lifetime; Cachexia is not expected to be a significant factor.

Timing artifact – The Framingham study covers a 74-year period in which BMI is increasing and also lifespan is increasing, probably for different reasons. The younger Framingham cohort is living ~4 years longer than the older cohort and is ½ BMI point heavier. This could create an illusion that higher BMI is causing greater longevity. However, the Ohio State study made some effort to pull this factor out. Greater lifespan is associated with gradually increasing BMI, and this is true separately in both cohorts.

Differential effects on CVD and Cancer This chart (from Zheng) shows how the mortality burden of cardiovascular disease has decreased over the last century, but not so cancer.

But CV disease risk increases consistently with BMI, while cancer risk, not so much (also from Zheng):

These numbers in parentheses are odds ratios from a Cox proportional hazard model. What they means is that a person in the Lower-Normal weight group had 20% less chance of getting heart disease compared to someone of the same age in the Normal-Upward group, but a 60% increased chance of getting cancer. These appear to be large, concerning numbers. But remember that the underlying probabilities are all increasing exponentially with age. Translated into years of lost life, 60% greater probability of cancer is only 1 year of life expectancy at age 50. (60% greater overall mortality would subtract 4½ years from life expectancy.) In my experience, hazard ratios in the range 0.7 to 1.5 don’t necessarily mean anything, because of the difficulties in interpreting data. The numbers in parenthesis after 1.60 in the above table (1.12 2.30) mean that statistical uncertainty alone is a range from 1.12 to 2.30.There are plenty of large effects with hazard ratios of 3 or more. For comparison, the hazard ratio for pack-a-day smokers getting lung cancer is 27.

Zheng’s study found a longevity disadvantage to being underweight, and it was exclusively due to a higher cancer risk. In fact, incidence of cardiovascular disease among the lowest BMI class was lowest (0.8); but their cancer risk more than made up for it (1.6). 

This means that as time goes on and most Americans are getting heavier, their risk of dying from CVD is blunted by improved technology. The mortality risk from CVD is down by 40% in this century [NEJM], while the cancer risk is unchanged [CDC]. So people are dying of cancer who would have died of CVD in previous generations. 

This means that low BMI has less benefit for longevity than it used to have, and the trend over time tends to exaggerate the appearance that higher weight is protective against all-cause mortality.

Is it true that cancer risk does not go up with BMI?

The Framingham result is puzzling and difficult to reconcile with a well-established relationship between higher BMI and higher cancer risk. This review by Wolin [2010] finds a modest increase in risks of all common types of cancer associated with each 5-point gain in BMI. (The RR numbers are comparable to hazard ratios above.)

Lung cancer is the big exception, and Wolin explains the inverse relationship with BMI by the fact that people smoke to avoid gaining weight. This would suggest a resolution to the conflict with Zheng’s study, but for the fact that Zheng explicitly corrects for smoking status and finds it makes no difference at all — a result which is puzzling in itself.

Alzheimer’s Disease is the third leading cause of death, and the corresponding story is more complicated. Lower weight in middle age seems to be mildly protective, while it is certainly not protective in the older years when AD is most prevalent.

“Hazard ratios per 5-kg/m2 increase in BMI for dementia were 0.71 (95% confidence interval = 0.66–0.77), 0.94 (0.89–0.99), and 1.16 (1.05–1.27) when BMI was assessed 10 years, 10-20 years, and >20 years before dementia diagnosis.”  [ref]

This, too, is unexpected in light of previous consensus. Alzheimer’s Dementia has been recast as Type 3 Diabetes, because of its strong association with insulin metabolism. Overweight is supposed to be the greatest life-style risk factor for diabetes. When this study [2009] out of U of Washington found that high BMI is protective against dementia, the authors were unwilling to draw the standard causal inference, so they conjectured instead  that weight loss is a consequence of AD’s early stage. 

There may be a better explanation hidden in their data. AD is the most common cause of dementia, but vascular dementia, a separate etiology, accounts for roughly ⅓ of cases in the Kame data set:

There is a suggestion here that higher BMI protects against vascular dementia, but not against AD.

From you, my readers

Here are some of the suggestions offered in the comment section of last week’s blog:

  • Fat people are happier.  I don’t doubt that happiness has a lot to do with longevity but a lot of overweight is due to compulsive eating by people who are not happy with their lives. Obesity is associated with lower socio-economic status, and lower SES is independently associated with shorter lifespan and lower life satisfaction.
  • Higher BMI can mean more muscle mass, not necessarily more fat mass. Good point. I don’t know how big a factor this is.
  • This study [BMJ 2016] found greatest longevity for BMI in the range 20-22.  I take your point that the larger studies with longer follow-up tend to report lower optimal BMI. The BMJ study is a meta-analysis of a huge database covering 9 million subjects.
  • Dean Pomerleau writes at the CR Society web page about brown fat, cold resistance, and greater longevity.
  • Thin people have greater insulin sensitivity, which can lead to glucose going into cells instead of being stored as fat. This is interesting, and deserves more follow-up. But good insulin sensitivity also means lower blood sugar, so its not obvious to me which direction the effect ought to go.
  • I was grateful for a pointer to Valter Longos recent work, recommending that time-restricted eating becomes counterproductive after about 13 hours a day of fasting. Longer fasts several times a year are still highly recommended.
  • Paul Rivas is my go-to authority on weight, and he recommended this 2015 study, which emphasizes the paradox as I describe it.
  • This study out of Emory U [2019] recommends different diets for different BMI groups for minimizing inflammation.

What story does methylation tell?

Aside from mortality statistics, I regard methylation age as the most reliable leading indicator we have. I’ll end by reviewing data on BMI and methylation age.

The Regicor Study [2017] looked for methylation sites associated with obesity. They reported 97 associated with high BMI and an additional 49 associated with large waistline. I compared their lists with my list of methylation sites that change most consistently with age. There was no overlap. What I learn from this is that there is no association with genetically-determined weight and longevity. If you were born with genes that make you gain weight, there is a social cost to be paid in our culture, but there is no longevity penalty.

Horvath [2014] did not discern a signal for obesity with the original 2013 DNAmAge clock, except in the liver where the signal was weak, amounting to just 3 years for the difference between morbidly obese and normal weight. But a few years later with 3 different test groups [2017], a moderate signal was found, as expected, linking higher BMI to greater DNAmAge acceleration. (Age acceleration is just the difference between biological age as measured by the methylation clock and chronological age by the calendar.) 

This study [2019] from the European Lifespan Consortium found a modest increased mortality from obesity, corresponding to less than a year of lost life by most measures, based on two Horvath clocks and the Hannum clock. This Finnish study [2017] found a small association between higher BMI and faster aging in middle-aged adults, but not in old or young adults.

This study from Linda Partridge’s group [2017] found a strong benefit of caloric restriction on epigenetic aging—in mice, not in humans. 

The bottom line

I’ve had a good time with this project, seeking explanations for the paradox, and I’ve passed along some interesting associations, but in the end, the essential paradox remains. I don’t know why the robust association of caloric restriction with longevity doesn’t lead to a clear longevity advantage in humans for a lower BMI. My strongest insight is that the largest determinants of BMI are genetic, not behavioral, and the genetic contribution to weight has no effect on longevity. But what do I make of the fact that life expectancy in the US has risen by a decade over my lifetime [ref] even as BMI has increased 5 points.

Weight and Aging: A Paradox, Part 1

Caloric restriction is the gold standard life extension strategy, validated over thousands of experiments in many animal species. How can we reconcile this with consistent findings that people who are slightly overweight live longer than normal or underweight folks?


The one fact that everyone in the field of aging agrees on is that animals fed less live longer. This is the result that got me interested in the field 25 years ago, and it is still the most robust finding in the field, verified in dozens of species from yeast cells to Rhesus monkeys.

Are humans different from all other animals?

Last month, a study came out of Ohio State U based on the famous Framingham database, including medical and demographic information on 5,000 people and their offspring, tracked over 74 years. The take-home message was that the people who lived longest were average weight when young and gained weight during their middle years. There were not enough people who had actually lost weight to constitute a subgroup, but the group identified as “low-normal weight” all through their lives showed up with 40% higher all-cause mortality than those that gained weight.

I wrote about this subject in my book, and in one of my first posts on ScienceBlog, back in 2012. The post was titled Ideal Weight may be an Illusion, and I concluded that

For any given individual, it’s probably true that
the less you eat the longer you live.” 

The argument went thus: Weight is mostly fixed by genetics, and the genetic component of weight does not affect longevity. It is relative calorie intake that affects longevity, relative to genetics, body type, and metabolism. For example, a study of genetically obese mice found that they had shortened lifespans if they were fed ad libitem, however, if the obese mice were calorically restricted, they actually lived longer than genetically normal mice, and even longer than CR normal mice, despite the fact that they still appeared plump. 

This line of reasoning led me to hypothesize that the reason overweight people tend to live longer is that they are motivated to restrict calories, whereas people (like me) who don’t get fat no matter how much we eat feel no social pressure to restrain our gluttony.

I thought at the time that we ought to see this effect much more in women than in men, because overweight women are ostracized in our culture, whereas men are not. What I found, contrary to my prediction, was that the BMI with lowest mortality (in Japan) is 23-25 for men, compared to 21-23 for women [Matsuo, 2012].

So, is it time to consider the possibility that caloric restriction doesn’t extend human life expectancy?

New Ohio State Study

The new study is based on the 74-year-old Framingham cohort, people whose health and daily habits have been followed over time. Also followed was a Framingham Offspring cohort, the children of the original Framingham cohort. Almost all the original cohort have now died (so we have extensive mortality data), but many of the offspring cohort is still alive. The authors treat the two cohorts separately, and get somewhat different results for the two cohorts. Dr Zheng was kind enough to send me the full preprint with supplemental tables, and since it’s not yet available online, I’ve made it available for you to read here on GDrive.

The study looks not just at BMI but also at the change in BMI over mid- to late-life years. They classify the trajectories in seven groups, and analyze them using a Cox model. They find that the group that has lowest mortality had an average trajectory beginning at BMI=22 at age 30, increasing gradually to BMI=27 at age 80. The group was broadly defined, so that initial BMI could be anywhere from 18.5 at the low end to 25 at the high end.

Cox Proportional Hazard Model
This statistical method is standard for studies like this evaluating effect on mortality. It is designed to take into account the steep rise in mortality with age, and weight different deaths according to when they occur. The standard assumption is that the mortality curve with age is changed by a multiplicative factor associated with each variable. The mortality curve retains the same shape across ages, but it slides up or down (on a log scale) according to which factors apply to a given subgroup. For example, having a graduate degree may multiply your risk of dying by 0.9 across the board, and eating red meat may multiply your risk by 1.2, so the model actually derives these numbers by assuming that meat-eaters with a graduate degree will have a relative probability of death 1.08 times the control group, and this applies at every age. (where 1.08 = 0.9 * 1.2)Is this quantitatively realistic? Everyone knows it is not, but it yields a single number which is a good benchmark for different longevity factors, and it allows different studies to report their results in a common format for comparison.

Division of subjects into seven groups was somewhat arbitrary, and was done to facilitate statistical analysis. The red railroad tracks represents midline of the trajectory associated with “longest lifespan”, defined above as the minimum Cox factor. The lowest weight group was associated with a Cox factor of 1.4, meaning 40% more likely to die (at a given age) than the red railroad track trajectory.

On the other side

CR extends lifespan in almost every animal model in which it has been tried. I won’t dwell on this, because it’s so well known, but I’ll note that CR works better in short-lived animals, as a percentage of lifespan and the enthusiastic projections of Roy Walford now seem overstated. I have said that I think CR in humans is good for 3 to 5 years. Do I still think so? There is good evidence for CR in humans.

  • Food shortages during World War II in some European countries were associated with a sharp decrease in coronary heart disease mortality, which increased again after the war ended.[Fontana, 2007
  • Fontana performed in-depth metabolic profiles of people identified from the Caloric Restriction Society who were disciplining themselves to eat less. Relative to people at a comparable age, he found “a very low level of inflammation as evidenced by low circulating levels of C-reactive protein and TNFα, serum triiodothyronine levels at the low end of the normal range, and a more elastic ‘younger’ left ventricle, as evaluated by echo-doppler measures of LV stiffness.” [2007]
  • There is at least preliminary evidence that weight loss tends to set back the aging clock, as measured by several methylation algorithms [2020]
  • Higher BMI is associated with older methylation age [2019]
  • C-reactive protein in the blood, the most common measure of inflammation, increases with increasing BMI [2003]
  • Loss of insulin sensitivity is a hallmark of aging, driving many age-related diseases. There is a strong correlation between BMI and diabetes [2007]
  • BMI is linked to most common cancers, the #2 source of mortality. Here’s a good review by Wolin [2010].
  • BMI is also a factor in cardiovascular disease, the #1 killer. This study from Malaysia [2017] found a trend of increasing CVD at every BMI level, but — like other studies — also found that all-cause mortality was lowest for BMI 25-30, which has traditionally been called “overweight”.

So, why doesn’t weight gain show up as a risk factor for faster aging?

I will continue this discussion in Part 2, and try to resolve this paradox in part, but (spoiler alert) I remain puzzled, after a month of reading on the subject.

Source: REB Research https://www.rebresearch.com/blog/fat-people-show-less-dementia/