Measuring if you are truly obese and if your risk for having a heart attack is high just got a whole lot easier. Researchers now say that a measuring tape is far more useful than a standard bathroom weight scale when it comes to determining if you are obese or at risk of a heart attack. A recent study published in the prestigious journal The Lancet, says that body mass index (BMI) is no longer the ideal method to predict the influence of body weight on the heart. And quite the influence it has — obesity raises your odds of having a heart attack significantly.
So what is the best method for predicting how your body weight will affect your heart? Finding out the ratio of the measurement of your waist to your hips. Wider hips and thinner waists are optimal for your health. Larger waists have always been a negative health risk.
This ratio proved to be an important predictor of your risk for heart attack — regardless of your age or sex. The discovery dampens what experts previously thought to be important, that is, BMI. Determining your BMI involved a slightly more complicated test that was based on height and weight. BMI simply was not as accurate as waist-to-hip ratio when assessing the risk.
Researchers looked at about 27,000 people, plucked from a wide array of countries (52 in total). More than 12,000 of the participants had experienced a heart attack at some point in their lives. The others had a clean bill of heart health. They were given surveys detailing all the risk factors for the heart, as well as their lifestyle and background (which was also used to measure risk).
They found that in all eight ethnic groups (because a diverse range of people were included), the waist-to-hip ratio was more strongly linked to heart attacks than BMI measurements. No matter which way the facts were sliced, the results did not vary. Waist-to-hip ratio is significant; BMI is not.
This is because abdominal fat, the kind that accumulates around the waistline, is a known culprit of heart problems. Wider hips, which are a good sign, means the bones have more bulk and the muscles in surrounding areas are stronger.
Abdominal fat is also called visceral fat and it adds girth around the abdominal organs. It is much more dangerous to your heart’s health than subcutaneous fat, which is found elsewhere in the body, lying just below the skin’s surface. People with higher levels of visceral fat are known to have a higher degree of stiffness in their arteries, which is a big risk factor for heart attacks, stroke, and heart disease.
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Tags: Heart Attack, obesity
