April 19, 2024 – “Illness.” This is what Dr. Marina Kurian thinks of in the case of visceral fat.
Just a little visceral fat – the fat you possibly can't see since it wraps around a few of your internal organs – is useful since it cushions your heart, lungs, and the organs in your gut. However, excess visceral fat can secrete more substances called cytokines into your body and bloodstream. Higher levels of those cytokines, also called cytokines, Adipokinesare related to a better risk of heart disease, diabetes and even some sorts of cancer.
So what are you able to do to stop visceral fat from becoming an issue? same advice generally refers to excess visceral fat and to the more familiar “subcutaneous fat.” If you pinch an inch, that's your subcutaneous fat. A healthy weight loss plan, exercise, and, if crucial, medication and/or surgery can reduce each sorts of fat.
“The risks of visceral fat can be reduced if we work toward a healthier body weight,” said Dr. Ethan Lazarus, past president of the Obesity Medicine Association.
What do the experts think?
There is not any easy and reliable method to measure how much visceral fat you may have, but experts generally agree that visceral fat makes up about 10% of total body fat, in order your overall weight increases, you are inclined to have more visceral fat. Visceral fat: health risks are often related to a waist measurement of greater than 35 inches for girls and 40 inches for men. Measurements needs to be taken on the hip level and above the belly button for most individuals.
“Visceral fat is bad for overall health,” says Kurian, president of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery and an obesity doctor with private practice in New York City and the encompassing area. More specifically, she says, it could actually result in hypertension, heart disease, prediabetes and fatty liver disease — and impact conditions like sleep apnea.
Visceral fat may cause systemic inflammation, but there are probably more ways it could actually cause health problems, says Lazarus, owner of the Clinical Nutrition Center in Greenwood Village, Colorado. It might be that visceral fat “promotes the risk of diseases like breast cancer, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer through a more hormonal mechanism. So there are a lot of different possibilities.”
Bariatric surgery was related to a 32% lower risk of obesity-related cancer and a 48% lower likelihood of dying from these cancers in individuals with obesity in a 2022 Study in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers have linked excess visceral fat to a better risk of 13 sorts of cancer, Lazarus said. Another study the identical 12 months showed that bariatric surgery is related to Reduced risk of heart diseasealso in people aged 65 and over.
Going beyond BMI
The body mass index also doesn’t provide an accurate measurement of visceral fat risk.
For example: “I see many [White] “I see women in their 60s with a BMI between 27 and 30 who, by other measurements, have extremely high levels of visceral fat and are a really high health risk,” Lazarus said. “And I see other people who are younger who have a BMI of 34 and low levels of visceral fat.”
“BMI really lets us down” in the case of visceral fat, he said.
Kurian agreed. “It is not the most accurate method to determine obesity. [excess body fat],” she said, citing former New York Giants defensive end Michael Strahan for instance.[Back] in the course of the day, [he] would have had a BMI of about 38 when he was all muscle, but in point of fact he was never prone to needing weight-loss surgery,” she said. However, BMI can be useful as a general indicator of overweight and obesity, “so it's not something we are able to completely do without.”
A body composition measurement by a health care provider might help determine visceral fat – Kurian says she offers this to her patients. She says providing the numbers from this evaluation can motivate patients.
Notably, bariatric surgery doesn’t remove visceral fat. Instead, the health advantages come from overall weight reduction, she said.