Abdominal Fat Strongest Indication of Health Risks
April 13, 2011 by Dr. Marc Darrow, M.D.
Filed under Diet and Lifestyle
Researchers writing in the medical journal Obesity, say that waist measurement is one of the most useful indicators of health risk.
Shen W, Punyanitya M, Chen J, Gallagher D, Albu J, Pi-Sunyer X, Lewis CE, Grunfeld C, Heshka S, Heymsfield SB. Waist Circumference Correlates with Metabolic Syndrome Indicators Better Than Percentage Fat.
From the article abstract
OBJECTIVE: Percent fat is often considered the reference for establishing the magnitude of adipose tissue accumulation and the risk of excess adiposity. However, the increasing recognition of a strong link between central adiposity and metabolic disturbances led us to test whether waist circumference (WC) is more highly correlated with metabolic syndrome components than percent fat and other related anthropometric measures such as BMI. (Body Mass Index)
Waist circumference had the strongest associations with health risk indicators, followed by BMI. Although percent fat is a useful measure of overall adiposity, health risks are best represented by the simply measured WC.