Remember all that advice about the life-extending powers of slenderness? Forget it, some of it anyway. Researchers at the University of California at Davis have found that while people who were severely obese and had diabetes or hypertension did have a higher risk of death compared to people of normal weight, those who were overweight or obese did not. Futurity reports that the findings, which appear in the July-August issue of The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, call into question previous studiesâ€â€using data collected when obesity was less commonâ€â€linking higher short-term mortality with any amount of extra weight. The researchers, who used nationwide data from 2000 to 2005 of nearly 51,000 adults aged 18 to 90 years, found that severely obese people were 1.26 times more likely to die during follow-up than people in the normal weight group. However, if people with diabetes or hypertension were eliminated from the data, those who were overweight, obese, or even severely obese had similar or even lower death rates than people of normal weight. Read more in Futurity.