Study: Dieting not harmful to elderly

Dieting to lose weight may not help older overweight adults to live any longer, but losing a little weight on purpose also does not seem to cause any harm, according to a study.

Previous studies had raised concerns that losing weight might be harmful to older adults, since some research had linked dropping weight to a higher rate of death.

"There is a general sense in geriatrics . . . that weight loss is a bad thing," said study author Stephen Kritchevsky, at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C.

"There's been a little bit of a conundrum on whether it's a wise thing or not to ask an overweight older adult to lose weight."

But Kritchevsky added that research linking older adults and weight loss to the higher rates of death may well be due to the fact that unintentional weight loss in the elderly is often due to an underlying illness.

For the study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Kritchevsky and his colleagues looked at data from a past study of overweight and obese adults with high blood pressure, some of whom had received training and counseling to help them lose weight and keep it off.

Participants in the weight-loss group lost close to 10 pounds, on average, while those who were told to modify the amount of salt in their diets or to not change their diets at all lost about 2 pounds.

SEE PHOTOSHow did these 150 LIers drop up to 320 lbs. each?

Twelve years later, the researchers used national death records to figure out which of the original participants were still alive. By then they would have been in their late 70s, on average.

-- Reuters