The new magic number
Posted on June 20th, 2008 – 8:15 AMBy Josephine Marcotty
What’s the magic number? 35 inches for women — 40 inches for men, measured right at the belly button.
I can’t help but wonder what Tim Russert’s number was, especially when I read what his internist, Dr. Michael Newman, told the New York Times: “If there’s one number that’s a predictor of mortality, it’s waist circumference.” Russert was taking both blood pressure and cholesterol medication and exercising every day. But he was significantly overweight, he said.
It’s a lot easier to focus on other numbers like LDL and triglycerides and blood pressure. But increasingly health experts are saying that the one that matters most is the one that’s easiest to measure (any tape measure will do) and hardest to change.
Never mind the scale. Never mind your BMI.
“Not all fat is equal as far as the medical problems that it causes,” said Dr. Charles Billington, an obesity expert at the University of Minnesota. “Fat located inside the abdomen is the most risky, most medically problematic fat.” He’s not talking about the fat that you can pinch, the stuff that hangs ever so attractively over our belts. He means the fat that you can’t see inside the abdomen, the stuff that encases your liver and your kidneys. That fat has for years been linked to heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure.
Health officials in many Asian countries, Japan in particular, are paying less and less attention to BMI as an indicator for health risk, and are focusing on the size of the waist. That’s because Asians with normal or moderately high BMI are developing heart disease anyway, Billington said.
In the United States, with its much broader mix of genes and body types, “we are not at the point where want to give up on BMI,” he said. Still, waist circumference has been recognized for years as an important indicator, he said.
Dr. Tim Henry, a cardiologist at Abbott Northwestern Hospital, says that waist circumference or obesity are not among the big five risks for heart disease. (Smoking. High blood pressure. High cholesterol. Diabetes. Family history.) But almost everyone who has high blood pressure or diabetes or high lipid counts is overweight anyway, he said. He doesn’t bother too much about where their patients carry it, he said. Still, he said, he knows that those with bigger waists are more likely to be at risk.
So I got out my tape measure this morning to find my magic number. It’s 31. (Whew!)
What’s yours?
One response to "The new magic number"
Here’s a better number. How many times a day to you stuff your face with meat and dairy products? Because that is the true measure of how much plaque you will have built up in your vascular system. Americans should cut back on animal product consumption by 90% and we will all reap the rewards of good health, and as a by-product, lower health insurance rates for all.
We are not cats or pure carnivores. So why do we eat like they do? Fruits and vegetables, whole grains like rice, beans and meat as a rare side dish, and all health problems vanish.
