I just sent MPB this article
Love handles increase death risk: study
AFP - Friday, November
14
WASHINGTON (AFP) - - A thick waist almost doubles the
risk of premature death, a major European study has found, showing
there's nothing lovely about love handles.
The research found that excess fat stored around the middle of
the body was a major health risk even when people are not
considered obese or even overweight by statistical BMI
standards.
In fact, each five centimetre increase in waist size increased
the risk of death by 17 percent in men and 13 percent in women.
"The most important result of our study is the finding that not
just being overweight, but also the distribution of body fat,
affects the risk of premature death of each individual," said
Tobias Pischon, the lead author of the paper from the German
Institute of Human Nutrition in Potsdam-Rehbr�cke.
The data should encourage physicians to routinely measure
patients' waists as well as their BMI on routine office visits,
according to the study carried out by the Imperial College London
(GB), German Institute for Human Nutrition and other European
participants.
"The good news is that you don't need to take an expensive test
and wait ages for the result to assess this aspect of your health -
it costs virtually nothing to measure your waist and hip size,"
said Elio Riboli, the European coordinator of the EPIC study from
the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Imperial
College London.
"If you have a large waist, you probably need to increase the
amount of exercise you do every day, avoid excessive alcohol
consumption and improve your diet. This could make a huge
difference in reducing your risk of an early death."
