17 Aug To Your Health: The Fat You Can’t See!
Welcome back to the series which offers a deep dive into the world of health, wellness, and disease prevention with Telluride local Dr. Alan Safdi.
Dr. Alan is a board-certified physician in Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology, a Fellow of the American College of Gastroenterology, and a respected leader in healthcare. His blogs have featured and will continue to showcase the most current information in his fields: health, wellness and longevity.
In this installment of “To Your Heath,” Dr. Alan talks about body fat. It is not all created equal.
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For decades, when we have talked about obesity and health, we have focused on one thing: body weight.
We step on the bathroom scale, calculate BMI, and assume those numbers tell us whether we are healthy.
But increasingly, we are learning that the more important question may not be “How much do you weigh?” It may be “Where is your fat located?”
Because all body fat is not the same.
Some fat sits underneath the skin in our arms, legs, hips, and abdomen. But another type, visceral fat, lies deep inside the abdomen, surrounding organs such as the liver, pancreas, and intestines.
And that fat appears to behave very differently.
Two people can have exactly the same weight and exactly the same BMI, yet have very different amounts of muscle, subcutaneous fat, and visceral fat – and therefore potentially very different health risks.
That may be one of the things we have missed for years by relying so heavily on the bathroom scale. And some recently published data really bring this home.
In a pooled analysis of long-term cohort studies, people with a normal BMI, but a large waist circumference or high waist-to-hip ratio, had roughly a 15% to 50% higher risk of many cardiovascular outcomes over about 20 years. Interestingly, people classified as obese by BMI, but who had a relatively small waist often had outcomes much closer to normal-weight individuals.
The message is becoming increasingly clear: BMI alone can miss important cardiovascular risk because it tells us how much we weigh, but not where we carry the fat.
And as we age, the scale can become even more misleading. We may lose muscle and gain abdominal fat without gaining a single pound.
So perhaps we need to stop asking only, “What do you weigh?” We should also be asking: Where is your fat? How much of it is visceral fat? And what does that tell us about our future health?
That is what we are going to explore today. Why visceral fat matters, how you can tell whether you may have too much of it, how we can actually measure it, and most importantly, what we can do about it.
Dr. Alan, more:
Dr. Alan Safdi is board-certified in Internal Medicine and in Gastroenterology and a Fellow of the American College of Gastroenterology. A proven leader in the healthcare arena, he has been featured on the national program, “Medical Crossfire” and authored or co-authored numerous medical articles and abstracts.
Dr. Alan is a long-time Telluride local, has been involved in grant-based and clinical research for four decades. He is passionate about disease prevention and wellness, not just fixing what has gone wrong.
He is also Chief Medical Officer Quadrant Health, partnered with and co-owned by Stanford University and Mayo Clinic.
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