Lower Your Cholesterol Naturally

Yesterday my post concerned testing for inflammation. I have posted an article about belly fat and how it might double death risk. Well now researchers have confirmed that fat cells inside the abdomen are secreting molecules that increase inflammation. It’s the first evidence of a potential link between abdominal fat and systemic inflammation.

For years, scientists have been aware of a relationship between disease risk and excess belly fat. “Apple-shaped” people, who carry fat in the abdomen, have a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes and other problems than “pear-shaped” people, who tend to store fat in the hips and thighs.

Too much abdominal fat is associated with a defect in the body’s response to insulin.

Using liposuction to remove excess belly fat won’t help either. In 2004, investigators found that removing abdominal fat with liposuction did not provide the metabolic benefits normally associated with similar amounts of fat loss brought about by dieting or exercising.
“Despite removing large amounts of subcutaneous fat from beneath the skin — about 20 percent of a person’s total body fat mass — there were no beneficial medical effects,” said Samuel Klein, M.D., the Danforth Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Science and the senior investigator on both studies. “These results demonstrated that decreasing fat mass by surgery, which removes billions of fat cells, does not provide the metabolic benefits seen when fat mass is reduced by lowering calorie intake, which shrinks the size of fat cells and decreases the amount of fat inside the abdomen and other tissues.”
A body stores fat as two basic types: subcutaneous and visceral. Liposuction, as mentioned above, removes fat from beneath the skin or subcutaneous fat. This fat does not secrete molecules that affect inflammation. Visceral fat – fat found close to the intestines and other internal organs – was found likely to secrete molecules that contribute to increases in systemic inflammation and insulin resistance.
The researchers sampled blood from the portal vein in obese patients undergoing gastric bypass surgery and found that visceral fat in the abdomen was secreting high levels of an important inflammatory molecule called interleukin-6 (IL-6) into portal vein blood.
Increased IL-6 levels in the portal vein correlated with concentrations of an inflammatory substance called C-reactive protein (CRP) in the body. High CRP levels are related to inflammation, and chronic inflammation is associated with insulin resistance, hypertension, type 2 diabetes and atherosclerosis, among other things.

This morning I read in the paper that the Army trying to keep its number of recruits up in wartime, has to deal with a problem that is new to America – teenage obesity. A top Army recruiter is considering making a ‘fat’ camp for possible soldiers – the number of obese recruits has increased so much that the Army might have to start a fat farm to transform chubby trainees into combat ready soldiers.
According to the defense department, over the past four years, 47,447 potential recruits flunked induction physicals because they were overweight. That represents about 20 percent of the total number of recruits.
The head of Army recruiting said that he wants to see a formal diet and fitness regimen running alongside a new school at Fort Jackson that helps aspiring troops earn their GEDs.
I have written that obesity can raise blood cholesterol levels and lead to type 2 diabetes. Now even our Army must contend with the years of bad eating habits and lack of exercise. On a positive note, fat farms are apparently successful in thwarting obesity and hopefully averting future obesity related health problems.

Researchers examined data on 359,387 European adults followed for nearly 10 years who were enrolled in the larger, ongoing European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) health study.
They found that people with the most belly fat had about double the risk of dying prematurely as people with the least amount of belly fat.
During the follow-up period, 14,723 of the study participants died.
After adjusting for overweight and obesity, as measured by body-mass index (BMI), waist circumference and waist-to-hip measurements were both independently associated with an increased risk for early death.
Death risk increased with waist circumference, whether the participants were overweight or not.
The study provides some of the strongest evidence yet linking belly fat to early death, says lead author Tobias Pischon, MD, MPH.
“Our study shows that accumulating excess fat around your middle can put your health at risk even if your weight is normal,” he says. “There aren’t many simple individual characteristics that can increase a person’s risk of premature death to this extent, independent of smoking and drinking.”
So Are You an Apple or a Pear?
How do you tell if you have more belly fat than is healthy?

To measure your waist circumference, place a tape measure around your waist at the smallest point, which is usually just above the navel. A waist size of 40 inches in men and 35 inches in women is generally considered to indicate increased health risk.
Waist-to-hip ratio is calculated by measuring your waist at the smallest point and your hips at the widest point — usually at the widest part of the buttocks — and dividing the waist measurement by the hip measurement. A waist-to-hip ratio of greater than 0.9 for men and 0.8 for women is generally considered high risk.

For more info on this visit the November 12 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

I have pointed out in other posts that in the U.S. we have an obesity epidemic. And it is occurring in our
children as well. As we sit playing video games and watching TV we are lacking in good old physical exercise.
Now doctors are seeing a correlation between obesity and heart disease as suggested by the following.

“It is clear that obesity is a risk factor for the development of premature cardiovascular disease in youth,”
reports Dr. Catherine McNeal, an associate professor of internal medicine and an assistant professor of
pediatrics at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine.

According to one scoring measure, obesity in male adolescents is a greater risk factor for
cardiovascular disease than smoking, McNeal noted.

The following is some more scary info.

Researchers at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Medicine and Children’s Mercy Hospital
used ultrasound to measure the thickness of the inner walls of the carotid arteries, located in the
neck, in 70 high-risk children aged 6 to 19.

The average age of participants was 13, most were white, and about half were male. Fifty-seven
percent had a body-mass index (BMI) above the 95th percentile for their age.

On average, participants’ “vascular age,” meaning the age at which this level of thickening would be
normal, was three decades older than their chronological age.

The researchers point out that this is not a definitive study since it only had a test group  of 70.
To me it seems that any group of children taken at random should not be overweight and should most
definitely not have ‘old areteries’.

Is it possible that this generation of youth will be the first generation to not outlive their parents?