Actually, I had never heard that there was such a belief, particularly
that it was widely held. I can easily believe that unintentional weight
loss can be a bad sign.  I was unable to find the online version of this
publication.

They found that deliberate weight loss was good with reduced chance of
death in the first 8 years of the follow up study

================================================================

ScienceDaily:

Science News

Belief That Intentional Weight Loss Is Harmful to Seniors Is Unfounded,
Study Suggests

ScienceDaily (Apr. 12, 2010) — A new study by researchers at Wake Forest
University Baptist Medical Center is the first to refute the widely held
belief that intentional weight loss in older adults leads to increased
risk of death.

In fact, the research shows that seniors who intentionally exercised
and/or modified their diets to lose weight were half as likely to die
within eight years of follow-up as their peers who did not work toward
weight loss, said M. Kyla Shea, Ph.D., first author on the study and a
research associate in the Department of Internal Medicine, Section on
Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine.

"It was an unusually strong and surprising finding," Shea said. "Our
data suggest that people should not be concerned about trying or
recommending weight loss to address obesity-related health problems in
older adults."

The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging, is currently
available online and is schedule to appear in a future print issue of
the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences.

Prior to this study, research that has looked at the association between
mortality and weight loss has not factored in the many different
potential causes of the weight loss. So, using a more rigorous
randomized trial approach, Shea and colleagues sought to prove or
disprove the idea that older individuals who actively tried to lose
weight increased their risk of death.

The research team re-analyzed data from a study of 318
community-dwelling, older adults over age 60, all with knee arthritis,
who were enrolled in a trial assessing the effects of weight loss and/or
exercise on physical function in the late 1990s. The initial weight-loss
intervention took place over a period of 18 months from 1996 through
1998, during which time the 159 individuals in the intervention groups
actively lost an average of 10.5 pounds. The non-intervention group lost
an average of 3.1 pounds naturally.

The researchers then checked to see if the study participants were still
living eight years later.

"Overall, we found that there were far fewer deaths -- half the number
-- in the group of participants that lost weight compared to the group
that did not," Shea said.

The finding was unexpected to seasoned gerontologists.

"For years, the medical community has relied on multiple epidemiological
studies that suggested that older people who lost weight were more
likely to die," said Stephen B. Kritchevsky, Ph.D., director of the J.
Paul Sticht Center on Aging at the Medical Center. "Weight loss in old
folks is just understood to be a bad prognostic sign. The data that
people have been using has been unable to separate the cause and effect
of the weight loss, however, and our study suggests that the weight loss
they've been studying may be the result of other health problems and not
of intentional weight loss."

The participants in this study had a constellation of common health
problems occurring in aging adults, Kritchevsky added.

"These were the seniors living out in the community, getting around and
doing their daily tasks just like your neighbor," he said. "All were
overweight and dealing with the signs of aging when the study started."

When the researchers evaluated the effect of weight loss in the oldest
of the participants -- 75 and older -- they found the same reduction in
mortality as they saw in the younger group -- those 60 and older -- who
lost weight.

Weight loss in older adults has been shown to help several medical
problems, Kritchevsky said, such as high blood pressure, high
cholesterol and high fasting glucose levels. However, physicians have
been hesitant to recommend weight loss in older adults because of a
concern for mortality based on previous research.

"This study puts to rest a lot of unfounded concerns about how to
address the epidemic of obesity among our older adults," Kritchevsky said.

He cautioned that the study was relatively small and the results should
be confirmed in other trials, but that the data gathered from this
analysis are sufficient enough to rule out any significant excess risk
due to intentional weight loss and to suggest that there may be a
mortality benefit to losing the weight, as well.

In addition to Shea and Kritchevsky, Wake Forest Baptist co-authors
included Denise K. Houston, Ph.D., Barbara J. Nicklas, Ph.D., Dalane W.
Kitzman, M.D., and Kimberly Kennedy, B.A., all of the J. Paul Sticht
Center on Aging; Cralen C. Davis, M.S. and Michael E. Miller, Ph.D.,
both of the Department of Public Health Sciences; Stephen P. Messier,
Ph.D., of Wake Forest University; and Tamara B. Harris, M.D., of the
National Institute on Aging.
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    Adapted from materials provided by Wake Forest University Baptist
Medical Center, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.