Rose Arianna McGowan (born September 5, 1973) is an Italian-born American actress best known for her role as Paige Matthews in The WB TV series Charmed, and the cult film The Doom Generation. She has also appeared in several major Hollywood films, with leading roles in Jawbreaker and the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez double-feature Grindhouse, and a supporting role in Scream. McGowan was until recently the co-host of TCM’s film-series program, The Essentials; in the most recent season, Alec Baldwin has replaced her as co-host.
Body mass index (BMI) is a calculation that uses a person’s height and weight to estimate how much body fat they have. A BMI less than 18.5 is categorized as underweight, 18.5 to 24.9 as normal or “healthy,” 25 to 29.9 as overweight and 30 or higher as obese. But, as the medical community has acknowledged, BMI has its shortcomings. One basic problem is that because the calculation is dependent solely upon height and weight, it makes assumptions about a person’s proportion of muscle and differences in bone density, and thus may overestimate adiposity on athletes and those with more lean body mass while underestimating adiposity on the elderly and others with less lean body mass. BMI also doesn’t give information on the location of the body fat, which is important in determining obesity-related risk for disease. That could explain why a recent study found that older people, men and women ages 70 to 75, who were overweight actually had a lower death rate than normal weight people as defined by BMI—findings that contradict the status quo.
“Concerns have been raised about encouraging apparently overweight older people to lose weight and as such the objective of our study was to examine the major unresolved question of ‘what level of BMI is associated with the lowest mortality risk in older people?’” said lead researcher Professor Leon Flicker, of the University of Western Australia. To address these concerns, Flicker and colleagues analyzed two population-based longitudinal studies, concentrating on a subgroup of 4,677 men and 4,563 women who were between the ages of 70 and 75 in 1996 at the beginning of the study. Their BMI was used to classify them as underweight, normal, overweight, or obese. The participants were followed for 10 years or until they died.
The end result was that during the study period, those classified as overweight were 13 percent less likely to die than those considered normal weight. The results were virtually the same for both men and women, even when they were divided into healthy or non-healthy groups. However, the reduction in mortality risk was not seen in participants who fell into the obese category nor for those who were inactive. In fact, being sedentary increased the risk of death by 28 percent in men and doubled the risk for women. “Overweight older people are not at greater mortality risk, and there is little evidence that dieting in this age group confers any benefit,” Flicker said. “Our study suggests that those people who survive to age 70 in reasonable health have a different set of risks and benefits associated with the amount of body fat to younger people.”
Flicker says the findings add evidence to claims that body mass index thresholds established by the World Health Organization (WHO) for older adults are “overly restrictive,” noting that they were derived primarily from studies of younger and middle-aged people. “It may be timely to review the BMI classification for older adults,” he said.
