A revised definition of excess body fat and its recommendation for recommending a more nuanced approach to the diagnosis and treatment of obese people using DEXA
“Fat in the belly causes systemic inflammation, which then goes on and causes other metabolic problems like elevated blood sugar, elevated blood pressure and increased fats in the blood,” Kushner explains. This can set the stage for metabolic diseases including diabetes as well as heart disease.
An international committee of scientists has proposed a change to the way obesity is defined and diagnosed. The goal is to offer a more nuanced and objective way to assess body composition, by adding more metrics, such as waist circumference, to the criteria.
The commission is chaired by Dr. Francesco Rubino of King’s College London.
The experts included in the Commission have expertise in nutrition, internal medicine, and public health. Their report was published in a journal.
Approximately 5 million deaths each year are related to disorders such as diabetes and heart disease, and nearly 1 billion people are affected by being obese.
The easy way to compare and measure a body mass index has long made it a useful tool for the diagnosis of overweight people. But it doesn’t offer a full picture of a person’s health, because it doesn’t account for differences in body composition, such as muscle versus fat.
“About 40% of the adult population in America has obesity, when it’s defined solely by BMI,” Kushner says. All of these millions of Americans may have a disease. And do they all need treatment? Kushner says the commission aims to give some clarity to the confusion.
Some people are stocky and muscular. The weight of the muscles can cause them to be classified as obese, if they step on the scale. But these folks may be healthy.
The commission recommends that excess body fat should be confirmed by measuring a person’s waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, or waist-to-height ratio. When this option is available and affordable, you can see your body fat through the use of a DEXA scans.
“We’re not throwing out BMI, we are now recommending that individuals have another measurement obtained that more directly gets an estimate of body fat,” Kushner says.
The revised definition, published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology1 on 14 January, focuses on how excess body fat, a measure called adiposity, affects the body, rather than relying only on body mass index (BMI), which links a person’s weight to their height.
He says that conventional methods lead to unneeded treatment for people who don’t need it. To address this, Rubino and his colleagues propose a system for diagnosing obesity that goes beyond BMI, combining it with other methods such as measuring waist circumference, which is a proxy for adiposity, or body scans using low-level X-rays, which can directly measure fat mass.
Louise Baur, a paediatrician at the University ofSydney, Australia, co-authored the study that found that tailoring assessments to age, gender and ethnicity were equally important because some people might experience health risks at a lower body mass index.
The idea is to eat less, move more and you will lose weight according to van Rossum. A healthy lifestyle is important but if it would be straightforward we wouldn’t have an epidemic.
There is a shift to improve the care of obese patients and the public-health policies.
