Writing for HealthDay News, Dennis Thompson said yesterday there was good news and bad news for smokers who worried about packing on extra pounds when they tried to quit.
According to a new study, quitters who gained a lot of weight faced a higher short-term risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
But the health benefits of quitting were so potent among the former smokers who took part in the study that they all experienced a substantial decrease in their risk of early death, no matter how much weight they gained.
People who gained more than 22 pounds after quitting had a 59 percent increased risk of developing diabetes, according to the report published on August 16 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
But quitters who gained that much weight also experienced a 50 percent decline in their overall risk of early death and a 67 percent drop in their risk of dying from heart disease.
But smokers who kept their weight gain to a minimum while quitting were best off, said senior researcher Dr. Qi Sun, an associate professor of nutrition with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
Meanwhile, Dr. Steven Schroeder, director of the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center at the University of California, San Francisco, who wrote an editorial that accompanied the study, said the results showed just how devastating smoking was to a person’s health.
“The damage from smoking is so overwhelming that it just beats everything else,” he said. “Nothing comes close to being so good for your health as stopping smoking.”
Weight-gain secondary
