Ali Safayan, noto medico specializzato in agopuntura che insegna ai colleghi in giro per la Federazione, ci invia questo studio valido per chi vuole affronttare una dieta estiva e per chi invece vuol ritrovare la forma perduta.
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If you are one of those people that stands on the scale
every day or you obsessively plug your numbers into a BMI calculator,
researchers want you to know you may be missing something.
BMI, which stands for body mass index, is determined
based on a person's height and weight. You're considered overweight if your BMI
is between 25 to 29.9 and you're obese if your BMI is 30 or above.
Chances are, even if you are not "fat," by
definition ofthese traditional measurements, you may still be
"overfat." And that's going to have some seriously negative
consequences for your overall health.
A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Public
Health suggests the number of people who meet the criteria for overfat in the
top 30 industrialized countries are more than all of the obese and overweight
people in the world. In fact, they estimate that 90% of the men and 50% of the
children in the US, New Zealand, Greece and Iceland are overfat. In the top
overfat countries, researchers found 80% of the women were overfat, too.
This adds to previousresearch published in January that
first suggested "the term more accurately encapsulates the problem
itself."
And if doctors rely only on the definitions we use to
consider someone "obese," or "overweight," they may not be
helping all the patients they should.
What is overfat?
Overfat is a term created to describe if you have a body
fat level that can actually hurt your health. Even people who are considered
"normal weight" or "non-obese" by traditional standards can
fall into this category.
The authors of this new studyargue that BMI misses about
50% of the people who still have dangerous amounts of fat. Those are typically
people who have the proverbial beer belly, but are otherwise in decent shape.
"We shouldn't be as much worried about weight,"
said author Paul Laursen, an adjunct professor and performance physiologist at
the Sports Performance Research Institute in New Zealand.Your scale or that BMI
calculator don't know that you could be an athlete and have a lot of muscle mass,
or a growing teen. Or, you could have gone on a fad diet and lost 3 pounds, but
that doesn't necessarily make you healthier — that 3 pounds could merely have
been water weight, he said. "What we should really be worried about is the
fat part and where your fat is concentrated."
Why's belly fat so bad
Abdominal fat is one of the most dangerous kinds of fat
you can have. The reason it's so bad is that unlike your love handles — which
are the pinchable fat right beneath your skin — the fat that is in your stomach
area grows deep inside your body and it wraps around your vital organs. Your
liver borrows this fat and turns it into cholesterol that can sneak into your
arteries and start collecting there. When it collects, your arteries start to
harden, and when they get hard, this can lead you to having a heart attack or
stroke.
This deep layer of belly fat is also what makes your body
insulin-resistant, which can lead you to having type 2 diabetes. It can also
cause inflammation, which scientists are finding at the root of many chronic
diseases and even cancer and Alzheimer's. Excess belly fat can also raise your
glucose levels and decrease your muscle mass. You need good muscle mass to help
keep good heart health.
It's no wonder earlier studies have shown that excess
belly fat, even if you are skinny elsewhere, may be even more deadly than being
obese or overweight. And that's saying a lot, since good old fashioned obesity
is related to all sorts of diseases and potentially life threatening problems
like cancer, heart attacks, stroke, asthma, sleep apnea, high blood pressure
and a handful of other problems.
If a doctor is relying on BMI to assess your potential
danger from your fat, they miss the risk. Earlier studies have also shown that
doctors that rely solely on BMI may miss other warning signs for people of
different ethnicities put them at greater risk for heart problems and other
health issues.
A better measure
What may be a better way to assess if you are overfat is
for your doctor to look more like a tailor and take a tape measure to your
waist, the authors argue. If you want to try this at home, measure your
circumference at your belly button. If your waist circumference is half your
height or less, you are at a healthy fat level. If you are over that number,
your fat could put you at risk for ill health.
It's not as perfect a measure as if your doctor were to
calculate your fat using an X-ray, but it's a good indicator, suggests Dr.
Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, a cardiologist and obesity expert at the Mayo Clinic
in Minnesota.
Lopez-Jimenez, who is not connected to this study, finds
overfat an interesting concept and thinks the author's suggestion of measuring
waist circumference is a good one. He said you could even do something simpler
and look at your hip to waist ratio — something a doctor could eyeball quickly.
"If the waist is bigger than the hips, it tells me that the risk carried
with that weight is much higher for that person for premature death,"
Lopez-Jimenez said.
But he's not convinced we need the term
"overfat," as he thinks it over-complicates matters.
"It basically adds a little more complexity to an
already complicated subject," he said. He suggests scientists may want to
broaden the term "obesity" to include people with normal weight BMIs
that carry too much fat around the middle.
Laursen thinks adding "overfat" to the lexicon
will give doctors one more important tool.
"We are so conditioned to walking up to the doctor's
office to get a pill for every issue, but that is not working. When it comes to
excess fat, the onus is really on the individual to figure out what works for
themselves," said Laursen, who added he gets upset that the overfat
epidemic has become such a large problem for so many. By giving doctors another
term it helps them have an honest conversation with their patients.
"Dealing with excess fat needs to be a
priority," he said, "as it truly can put someone's life in
jeopardy."
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