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To: KonKilo who wrote (23532)	3/17/2005 11:14:45 AM
From: Bucky Katt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 48465

Obesity will fuel nose dive in U.S. life span. Or, how to save social security........? The Associated Press CHICAGO – U.S. life expectancy will fall dramatically in coming years because of obesity, a startling shift in a long-running trend toward longer lives, researchers contend in a report published today. By their calculations – disputed by skeptics as shaky and overly dire – within 50 years obesity likely will shorten the average life span of 77.6 years by at least two to five years. That is more than the impact of cancer or heart disease, said lead author S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This would reverse the mostly steady increase in American life expectancy that has occurred in the past two centuries. And it also would have tremendous social and economic consequences that could even inadvertently help "save" Social Security, Olshansky and colleagues contend. "We think today's younger generation will have shorter and less healthy lives than their parents for the first time in modern history unless we intervene," Olshansky said. Already, the alarming rise in childhood obesity is fueling a new trend that has shaved four to nine months off the average U.S. life span, the researchers say. With obesity affecting at least 15 percent of U.S. school-age children, "it's not pie in the sky," Olshansky said. "The children who are extremely obese are already here." The report appears in the New England Journal of Medicine. In an accompanying editorial, University of Pennsylvania demography expert Samuel H. Preston calls the projections "excessively gloomy."