Ahh c'mon maxi. As a stickler for accuracy and detail you should be ashamed of yourself for making such a generalised statement.
Fitting wheels whose offset puts the centreline of the tyre miles from the manufacturer's default (i.e. so that the tyres protrude from the arches) might eventually wear the wheel bearings prematurely, but fitting wheels that keep the tyres legally within the profile of the wheel arch isn't necessarily going to knacker the bearings in any practical sense. Bearings have a wide margin of safety built in and the proportional extra stress caused by slightly offset wheels will barely register compared with the forces generated during fast cornering or under other heavy loads. For example, the 16" Fiat alloys we fitted place the tyres' centrelines about 10mm outboard compared with the original 15" wheels. Will the wider wheels knacker the bearings? I doubt it.
