Extreme obesity, defined as a Body Mass Index of 40 or higher, which for most people means being about a hundred pounds overweight, cuts life expectancy by 10 years, according to Richard Peto and colleagues at Oxford University in England.

That deleterious impact is the equivalent of a lifelong cigarette smoking habit.

The merely obese, who have a BMI in the range of 30-35, are sacrificing 2-4 years, while overweight folks, who have BMIs in the 25-29.9 range, short themselves and their loved ones by a year or so.

(If you know your height and weight, you can calculate your BMI here.)

The relationship between excessive weight and premature mortality turns out to be linear; for every 5-point jump in BMI above the optimal range, the risk of early death jumps by 30%.

The scientists reached these conclusions after pooling data from 57 studies of nearly 900,000 US and Western European adults that had been followed for 10-15 years.

Nearly 70,000 people died during the observation period. The scientists adjusted the data for age, smoking status and gender.

Almost all excess mortality was caused by cardiovascular disease and stroke, study co-author Gary Whitlock told USA Today. The epidemiologist explained that “obesity causes heart disease and stroke by pushing up blood pressure, mucking up blood cholesterol and triggering diabetes.”

The write-up appears in Lancet.

This is a “valuable study that provides a much clearer picture of the risk associated with various levels of being overweight or obese,” Michael Thun, an emeritus vice president of epidemiological research at the American Cancer Society told USA Today.

Nearly two-thirds of US adults are either overweight or obese, and fully half of those are obese.

“Once you gain weight, it’s hard to lose it and easy to gain more. So the goal to stop your weight gain now,” Thun warned.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has taken a page out of FDR’s playbook with weekly televised talks to his countrymen. Problem is, few of them are watching.

It seems they’ve tired of his message, which amounts to a remix of Albert King’s woeful lament, “if it wasn’t for bad news, I’d have no news at all.”

A recent poll revealed for example, that a third of Russians expected to lose their jobs in the immediate future.

February’s industrial output, including oil and minerals, was down 13.2% versus the same month last year, and manufacturing output shriveled a whopping 20%, according to the Economist.

Meanwhile wage arrears, the most visible symptom of Russia’s economic chaos in the 1990s, are creeping up again. State-approved reports suggest that more than 500,000 people had pay withheld temporarily last month, which is higher than at any point in 4 years.

Given these are state-approved reports, one can only imagine how bad the matter has actually become.

Medvedev has even taken the unusual step of appealing for help from the oligarchs. They have “a moral role” to preserve jobs, he stated while reminding them how easily they amassed wealth during different economic times.

“It’s time to repay debts, moral debts,” he said in his last chat.

“If a person really has become a businessman, he knows how to value his employees.”

Then he waded directly into the fray, calling it “unacceptable” that billionaire Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Bank was threatening to close down billionaire Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element, laying off tens of thousands in the process, if the latter didn’t repay an overdue $650m loan.

The oligarchs buried the hatchet the next day.