Why watch your waist?
From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I'm Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat. Watching your waistline isn't as simple as it looks. There are different kinds of fat under that belt – subcutaneous, which is just under the skin, and visceral, which is around your organs. Researchers say visceral fat is worse. Jennifer Kuk of Queen's University in Canada looked at images of fat in men's bellies. Her study, which was supported by the National Institutes of Health, was in the journal Obesity Research. Kuk found that as the amount of visceral fat went up, so did men's risk of death. This wasn't the case with subcutaneous fat. Of course, people don't have fancy scanning machines. But they do have belts: "Although waist circumference won't tell us exactly how much visceral fat they have, we know that an individual who has an increased waist circumference is probably increasing their visceral fat." (10 seconds) Learn more at www.hhs.gov. HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Ira Dreyfuss. Last revised: August, 15 2006 | 
