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Weight Concerns
Published in Carolyn Torkelson, Catherine Marienau, Beyond Menopause, 2023
Carolyn Torkelson, Catherine Marienau
There are two kinds of body fat: subcutaneous fat and visceral (intra-abdominal) fat.Subcutaneous fat is the belly fat you can feel if you pinch excess skin and soft tissue around your middle. In most people, about 90% of body fat is subcutaneous, the kind that lies in a layer just beneath the skin.Visceral fat accumulates in your abdomen in the spaces surrounding the liver, intestines, and other organs. It’s also stored in the omentum, an apron-like flap of tissue that lies under the belly muscles and covers the intestines. Although visceral fat makes up only 10% of body fat, it is linked more strongly than subcutaneous fat to greater risk of serious health problems such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease. No matter what your body shape or BMI, excess belly fat isn’t good for your health.
Weight and health
Published in Sally Robinson, Priorities for Health Promotion and Public Health, 2021
Body fat is essential to protect the organs of the body, to keep the body warm, to help the body to absorb fat-soluble vitamins, to store and provide energy, to support the growth of cells and to produce some hormones. Fat cells are stored in adipose tissue, a connective tissue found throughout the body. Sub-cutaneous fat sits beneath the skin. Visceral fat is in the abdomen, surrounding and infiltrating the major internal organs.
Genetics of Obesity: Family Studies
Published in Claude Bouchard, The Genetics of Obesity, 2020
Claude Bouchard, Louis Pérusse
Abdominal visceral fat is the type of obesity with the most critical metabolic and health implications. Less is known about the causes of individual differences in abdominal visceral fat level than for the other types of obesity. Visceral fat increases with age, in both genders, in lean as well as obese individuals.41 Males have on the average more visceral fat than females, and the obese have more than lean persons. However, the level of visceral fat is only moderately correlated with total body fat, with a common variance level ranging from about 30 to 50% and perhaps lower.40,42 In women, high plasma androgen and Cortisol concentrations are commonly seen. In addition, high lipoprotein lipase and lipolytic activities in the visceral adipose depot are observed, but it is not known whether these characteristics are causes or effects of visceral obesity. No data have been reported on the heritability of abdominal visceral fat levels, and the population data needed to deal with this issue are difficult to generate with the present methodology since visceral fat can be assessed only by computerized tomography (CT) or nuclear magnetic resonance. In addition, the visceral fat draining in the portal circulation seems to be the visceral depot of greatest importance from a metabolic point of view, but no simple method is available to quantify the size of that depot.
Sugar-Sweetened Beverages and Cancer Risk: A Narrative Review
Published in Nutrition and Cancer, 2022
Carmen Arroyo-Quiroz, Regina Brunauer, Silvestre Alavez
High sugar intake as a driver of visceral fat accumulation was proposed in the NutriNet-Sante study (38, 39, 103). Compared to subcutaneous fat, visceral fat exhibits a high level of macrophage infiltration and proinflammatory activity and therefore drives a systemic proinflammatory environment, which in turn increases cancer risk (64, 117). Independently from visceral fat accumulation, high glycemic load could also lead to a higher inflammatory status and thereby increase cancer risk (46). High sugar intake elevates postprandial blood glucose, which stimulates the production of pro-oxidant molecules [e.g., peroxinitrite (78)] and induces DNA damage, thus increasing cancer risk. Consistently, an association between high glycemic index and glycemic load and cancer risk has been suggested (79). Excessive sugar intake can also generate endogenous advanced glycation end products, which are highly reactive metabolites resulting in cytokine secretion and increased markers of oxidative stress production (80). All these mechanisms produce severe damage to cells and tissues and have the potential to contribute to the development or progression of certain types of cancer.
Fatty liver is a sensitive early warning for hypertension and its complication in the Chinese population
Published in Clinical and Experimental Hypertension, 2022
Xin-Ping Zhu, Gao-Chao Han, Qiang Chen, Zheng-Yan Zhang, Li-Shun Wang, Bo Zhang
At present, the commonly used methods for detecting visceral fat and central obesity include measurement of waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, ultrasound, CT, MRI, and obesity-related biochemical laboratory examination. There is no clear unified opinion on the measurement selection. For different populations, the risk of obesity-related diseases is often required to choose different means of examination and testing for faster and more efficient evaluation. In order to find more reliable and effective methods for early warning of obesity-related diseases, the prevalence and the risk of various diseases have been compared in amount of studies. The nonalcoholic fatty liver is currently well recognized to be tightly related to obesity, which can potentially be used as an ideal index of visceral obesity and be tightly associated with metabolic abnormality (6). Even that the sensitivity and application range of nonalcoholic fatty liver and BMI abnormalities as the index of obesity examination are still controversial, but the application is simple and practicable, and thus it is the most recognized indicator of obesity and visceral fat abnormality (7–9).
Gender difference in the relationship between lipid accumulation product index and pulse pressure in nondiabetic Korean adults: The Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2013–2014
Published in Clinical and Experimental Hypertension, 2022
Hyun Ho Sung, Mi Young Gi, Ju Ae Cha, Hye Eun Cho, Ae Eun Moon, Hyun Yoon
Visceral or intra-abdominal fat surrounds internal organs inside the peritoneal cavity, in contrast to subcutaneous fat, which is found underneath the skin, and intramuscular fat, which is found interspersed in skeletal muscle (1). An increase in visceral fat is associated with an increased risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease (CVD), and all-cause mortality (2). The lipid accumulation product (LAP) is a gender-specific index based on waist circumference (WC) and triglycerides (TGs) and reflects the physiological changes related to intra-abdominal lipid over-accumulation (3). LAP has been suggested as an effective marker of lipid accumulation in ectopic sites, such as the skeletal system and liver (4). Previous studies have revealed that LAP is a better predictor of increased risk of CVD events and all-cause morbidity and mortality compared to body mass index (BMI) or WC (3,5,6).