People with a BMI of 27 live the longest

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The body-mass index (BMI) value associated with the lowest risk for all-cause mortality is now 27, down from 24 in the 1970s, according to a large Danish cohort study.
That means the lowest-risk BMI is now in the overweight category, said Børge Nordestgaard, MD, of Copenhagen University, Denmark, and colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
In addition, compared to BMIs in the conventional normal range, the hazard ratio for all-cause mortality associated with a BMI of 30 or higher has dropped from 1.3 to about 1.0 over the same time period, the Danish scientists said.
"To the extent these findings are replicable and generalizable, they raise both interesting hypotheses and reiterate points made in earlier work," said Tapan Mehta, PhD, an obesity researcher the University of Alabama at Birmingham, in an email to MedPage Today. Mehta is also on the advocacy committee of The Obesity Society

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