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---------------------------------------- Cut diets from New Year's resolutions, experts say ---------------------------------------- BOSTON (January 1, 1998 01:42 a.m. EST http://www.nando.net) - If your New Year's resolution includes dieting, the top editors of the New England Journal of Medicine advise you to eat up. "Until we have better data about the risks of being overweight and the benefits and risks of trying to lose weight, we should remember that the cure for obesity may be worse than the condition," Drs. Jerome Kassirer and Marcia Angell said in an editorial in Thursday's edition of the prestigious weekly. Their comments come in the same issue as a study showing that the risks of being overweight seem to decline as people get older. Using a complex formula that links height to body weight, a research team led by Dr. June Stevens of the University of North Carolina confirmed that heavier people tend to die at a younger age. But they also found, based on data from 62,000 men and 262,000 women, that the extra pounds pose the greatest hazard to people under 44. The later the pounds appear, the less they raise the risk of death in general or heart disease in particular, according to the study. Although the findings of the Stevens team dovetail with past research, executive editor Angell said all the research on body weight has left too many key questions unanswered for people to rush into dieting. "We simply do not know whether a person who loses 20 pounds will thereby acquire the same reduced risk as a person who started out 20 pounds lighter," Kassirer and Angell said. For those substantially overweight, the editors stressed that the risks of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes rise sharply. But for others trying to look a bit trimmer, the frustration and anxiety of dieting may not be worth it, they said. "Since many people cannot lose much weight no matter how hard they try, and promptly regain whatever they do lose, the vast amounts of money spent on diet clubs, special foods and over-the-counter remedies, estimated to be on the order of $30 billion to $50 billion yearly, is wasted," they said. Some doctors, especially those pushing weight loss drugs, ignore the ambiguous benefits of weight loss and overstate the dangers of obesity, they said. Kassirer and Angell advised doctors to "help the public regain a sense of proportion" in the national battle of the bulge. "Many Americans are sacrificing their appreciation of one of the great pleasures of life -- eating -- in an attempt to look like our semi-starved celebrities," they said. Copyright © 1998 Nando.net Copyright © 1998 Reuters ----------------------------------------- janet paterson / 50-9 / [log in to unmask]