NATIONAL POST – While it’s been acknowledged for some time that visceral fat — belly fat —that wraps around internal organs is a health hazard, new research suggests it’s particularly dangerous to the male heart.
Researchers who studied advanced cardiovascular MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans of 2,244 adults aged 46 to 78 without known heart disease found that abdominal obesity — an unhealthy hip-to-waist ratio — is associated with worrisome patterns of “cardiac remodelling,” more so than overall weight alone.
The findings “highlight the need for personalized risk assessment in obesity-related cardiovascular disease,” the authors wrote in research presented at this week’s annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago.
Canadians are experiencing “high and growing levels” of fat stored around the waist and stomach, Statistics Canada reports.
From 2022 to 2024, nearly half (49 per cent) of adults aged 18 to 79 had a waist circumference above the threshold for abdominal obesity, meaning greater than 102 centimetres for males and greater than 88 cm for females).
The National Post reached out to the study’s lead author, Dr. Jennifer Erley, a radiology resident at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany to break the findings down. The conversation, via email, has been edited for clarity and length.
Obesity is very common in our modern society, about to replace smoking in terms of costs and health-care consequences.
However, we still don’t really know if obesity has independent effects on the heart, because obese people often also suffer from other cardiovascular risk factors, such as diabetes and high blood pressure.
We also don’t really know if the effect of obesity on the heart is different for men and women, although men and women suffer from different types of obesity. Males generally tend to be more obese and tend to have more visceral obesity, which is sometimes described as ‘beer belly.’
The BMI has been increasingly facing a moment of reckoning …
