Muscles Of Human

A young healthy man will have about 15% body fat and a woman 25%

WEIGHT : Muscles and other active tissues begin to die by about 0.5 per cent a year after 25 and are replaced by fat. But a combination of high-energy diets, less exercise in middle age and the slowing down of the basal metabolic rate [the rate at which the resting body convests fuel into energy] means that bodies are fed energy beyond their needs and tend to gain fat at a faster rate than they lose active tissue. So while the proportion of fat to muscle increases with age, so does overall weight, leading to the middle age spread between 35 and 65. A young healthy man will have about 15 per cent body fat and a woman 25 per cent. At 70 they will have double those amounts but after that overall weight seems to go down again, possibly because there are fewer fat people in statistics.