Despite your actual weight or body mass index (BMI), if you’re carrying a spare tire or rocking a muffin top around the middle, you could be at a higher risk of dying in the ‘medium’ term.
So you may want to reconsider the beer and pizza intake, even if the scale says you’re in okay(ish) shape.
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For a while now, researchers and doctors alike have suspected that a person’s BMI – which tells you how appropriate the correlation your weight is to your height – isn’t a good measure of body fatness or overall health. Of particular concern is fat that accumulates in the belly and within abdominal organs and leads to inflammation and glucose intolerance. It also poses risk factors for Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Now, a new study published in the scientific journal Annals of Internal Medicine confirms that people with normal BMIs but who carry more than a little extra weight around the middle are at the highest risk of dying.
Researchers assessed the five and 10-year mortality risk in men and women with normal BMIs but with central obesity compared to those who were considered overweight or obese based on BMI. This included more than 15,000 participants, all of whom were followed for an average of 14.3 years as part of the U.S.-based Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (known as NHANES III).
The findings are actually quite telling: for a male with central obesity and normal BMI, the mortality risk was double that of those who were overweight or obese based on BMI alone. Yes, double. Yikes. For females with central obesity and normal BMI, the mortality risk was nearly 1.5 times higher than for those with a problematic BMI but without fat concentrated in the middle.
In other words, it’s not just about how much fat you have, but where that fat is.
“The worst fat is in the midsection. It’s in the intra-abdominal cavity, in the organs,” Dr. Raj Padwal, a physician at the University of Alberta’s faculty of medicine who studies cardiovascular risks and obesity, told the CBC. “Fat infiltrating that area of the body is definitely the worst in terms of future risk of cardiovascular complications and future risk of death.”
The reason, he said, is because central obesity is linked to the mid-section fat infiltrating the pancreas and liver, which is linked to risk of Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, and eventually end-stage liver failure.
Because of this, BMI should no longer be used clinically. Instead, Padwal says that waist-hip ratio or waist circumference should be measured – so you may want to bust out those measuring tapes.
To calculate your waist-to-hip ratio, measure your waist at its narrowest, then divide that by the measure of your hips at their widest.
If the calculation is greater than .85 in women or .90 in men, then you need to make some lifestyle adjustments (i.e. cut down on the beer) if you want to stick around to see your grandchildren.
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