A third of heart disease deaths are caused simply by being overweight, researchers have found. In a ten-year study of 20,000 men and women aged 20 to 65, Dutch scientists found that being overweight accounted for half of fatal heart disease cases.
When they applied this statistic to the general population - where average levels of obesity are lower than in the study - they concluded one in three fatalities were caused by being too fat. Daily Mail, December 8, 2009