Obesity Facts

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Researchers have claimed that it is not at all important that obese people will get connected to heart diseases as it highly depends on which body organ the fat is going to accumulate. Dr Norbert Stefan, University of Tubingen, Germany, reported that a metabolically benign obesity exists in human body and 25% of obese people. The earlier studies indicated that visceral fat which is accumulated in the abdomen is connected with the risk of diabetes and heart disease. It reveals that it is less likely to occur in the obese people as Stefan et al discovered the quantity of visceral fat was a strong signal of insulin resistance with balanced weight.

Stefan stated: “We desired to study why some of the obese people are still insulin sensitive whereas other people with a same body mass are insulin resistant.” They studied 314 white adults who either have a history of type 2 diabetes mellitus or an earlier diagnosis of weak glucose tolerance or gestational diabetes.

All subjects went through MRI scans to calculate total body fat, visceral fat, subcutaneous fat, waist, and fat in ectopic tissues. The subjects were categorized in four groups and they are normal weight, overweight, obese insulin sensitive and obese insulin resistant.

The results have revealed that the results is not up to the mark in the case when the percentage of visceral fat was higher in obese people with insulin resistant than obese people having insulin sensitive. Liver fat is not regarded as the worst criminal as compared to liver or muscle fat. But the main problem lies in inability to recognize the level of liver and muscle fat in human body which can be done through expensive MRI scans. So for short term, waist circumference provides some risk and the information can be obtained from getting blood insulin measurements.

Now the second study which was done by a team led by Dr Rachel Wildman of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York. They discovered that disease risks which are linked with obesity might be different. It leads to the examination of body size phenotypes. They started to discover about the occurrence of body size phenotypes-normal weight with or without cardiometabolic abnormalities and excess weight with or without cardiometabolic abnormalities.

To conduct this research, they investigated data from 5440 participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) 1999-2004. Cardiometabolic abnormalities contained hypertension; elevated triglycerides, speeding plasma glucose, and C-reactive protein; insulin resistance and low HDL.

The results have revealed that 23.5% of normal-weight teenagers were metabolically impair whereas 51.3% of overweight teenagers and 31.7% of obese adults were strong. The main factors which are linked with cardiometabolic abnormalities in normal-weight people include older age and lower physical-activity levels. On the other hand, the factors related with inadequate ardiometabolic abnormalities in overweight and obese people include younger age, non-Hispanic black race and maximum sedentary-time physical-activity levels.