Scientists from Uppsala University found that deep belly fat is a major risk factor for diabetes and heart disease.
They found that deep belly fat could cause diabetes, heart attack, and high blood pressure. In addition, deep belly fat is a larger risk factor in women compared to men.
The research is published in Nature Medicine and was conducted by Dr. Torgny Karlsson et al.
Visceral fat—fat stored around the organs in the belly and around the intestines—is known to be linked to a higher risk of developing diabetes and heart disease.
In the study, the team analyzed data from over 325,000 participants to examine how genes affect the accumulation of fat.
They developed a method to more easily estimate belly fat content. The method is not only useful for research purposes but may also be useful in health care.
The simple method estimates a person’s amount of deep belly fat from other parameters, more easily measured than the visceral fat itself, and the method can, therefore, be used in most clinics.
The method also enabled the researchers to study the effects of visceral fat on a much larger scale than before.
The team was surprised that visceral fat was more strongly linked to the risk of disease in women compared to men.
Adding an extra kilogram of visceral fat can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes more than seven times in women, while the same amount of fat accumulation only increases the risk a little more than two times in men.
The scientists also found that the risk of disease increases most rapidly in people with small or moderate amounts of deep belly fat, but that it does not increase nearly as much if a person with large amounts of fat in the abdomen puts on additional fat.
The scientists also examined millions of positions in the genome to identify genes that affect the amount of visceral fat and found more than two hundred different genes.
Among these, there was a large proportion of genes that are linked to our behavior, which suggests that the main contributor to abdominal obesity is, after all, that we eat too much and exercise too little.
However, there are individual differences in how the fat is distributed in the body, and a person who appears not to be overweight may still have accumulated a harmful amount of visceral fat.
The team says the findings may enable doctors to simplify measurements of visceral fat, and thus more easily identify people at high risk of developing diabetes and heart disease.
If you care about heart health, please read studies about how to reverse heart failure with diet, and how to treat and prevent heart attack in people with diabetes.
For more information about diabetes, please see recent studies about a cure for type 2 diabetes, and results showing diabetes drug metformin may reverse liver inflammation.
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