More news about being fat is risky for your heart....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-29-2009

Last Tuesday, 12-22, AFP online health news had this headline.:

“New study sharpens focus on problems of obesity .”

This study found that being too fat was more closely linked to cardiovascular disease – & dying from it -- than had previously been estimated.

They used the “body mass index” called BMI for short, of 30.0 or more to be indicative of being obese or definitely too fat. (Since men who are muscular can get such readings without being fat, I think the waist measurement is more accurate as we posted on recently. But, to be fair, probably 99% of people with BMI readings of 30.0 or more are indeed too fat.)

You can go online and enter BMI into a search engine to find calculators and tables to simplify measuring your BMI. (With a tape measure and no math or going online you can measure your waist. If you are a woman, and your waist is 35.0 inches or more or you are a man and your waist is 40.0 inches or more, that’s usually about equal to a BMI of 30.0 or more. And, it is more indicative of risk & being too fat since your BMI may still be a bit under 30.0.)

Researchers from Britain's University of Bristol and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden measured BMI of 30.0 or more in over a million pairs of Swedish people, using mother & sons and fathers & sons -- over a 50 year time period.

They found a particularly strong link between having a BMI of over 30.0 & dying of cardiovascular disease -- which they said was "substantially underestimated" by the research they had seen previously.

There are four reasons for this connection in my view.

1. People who eat many foods made from refined grains and drink soft drinks and eat a lot of sugar or high fructose corn syrup – as all too many people all over the world have begun to do – tend to be much fatter than people who eat nonstarchy vegetables, plant protein foods other than grains such as mushrooms, nuts, and beans &/or eggs and meat from naturally raised animals or wild caught & unpolluted fish and seafood.

But ingesting a lot refined grains, soft drinks, & sugar or high fructose corn syrup also directly causes insulin resistance, high insulin levels, and excessively high blood sugar including type 2 diabetes. These effects not only fatten the people who do this, eating this way also directly causes damage to the surface of your blood vessels that in turn triggers you developing heart disease.

Some ideas:

If you drink 3 soft drinks a day, one study found that of your excess fat, about 45 pounds of it is from that source alone. Suppose you switched to one cup of tea or green tea with no milk or sugar and two glasses of low sodium V8. The evidence is that after about a year, if you do this every day and keep doing it & drink no more soft drinks, you will be 45 pounds less fat even if you do nothing else! (And, if you have high blood pressure, it may well improve enough you will no longer need to take drugs for it.)

Real fruit juice is good for you in its nutritional value. But if you switch every other day to drinking real, 100 % cranberry juice or low sodium V8 instead of orange, grape, or apple juice, you will get a similar though smaller effect.

One thing I’ve found also works well is to ask for an extra serving of vegetables instead of rice or potatoes when I eat in restaurants. I still enjoy the main dish and the ambiance and the company – and I’m full when I’m done. But I avoid the starch and starchy grains by doing this. And, I increase the number of vegetables I ate that day.

If you make over virtually all your eating and drinking habits with similar strategies and get used to eating right, you can lose a LOT of fat without eating that much less or becoming more hungry.

And, the increased phytonutrients and other protective compounds you get that you weren’t getting before not only remove your excess fat, they do things like lowering your LDL cholesterol and triglycerides and increasing your HDL, which directly tends to protect you from cardiovascular disease AND cancer AND Alzheimer’s disease AND type 2 diabetes.

Small wonder the people who eat differently and are fatter, get more heart disease and fatal heart attacks.

2. Regular exercise, even moderate kinds like walking, increase your muscles, their weight, and the amount of calories your body burns each week both from the exercise directly and from the increased calories used by your added muscle the rest of the time. Since strength training does this unusually well; & both strength training and vigorous interval cardio cause your body to burn extra calories for up to several hours after you do them, those two kinds of exercise are extremely helpful in helping you lose excess fat & keep it off.

Not only that, the fat that exercise removes best is the hidden, visceral fat that tends to be most harmful to your heart and that even normal weight people who don’t exercise have too much of. In addition, vigorous exercise directly releases growth hormone & slows your rate of aging; it lowers high blood sugar as measured by your HBA1C, it improves the resilience of your blood vessels and increases your circulation -- & it even grows new brain cells.

In short & in addition to strongly helping prevent you from getting or staying fat, such exercise directly protects your heart.

3. The excess fat itself is metabolically active and tends to produce changes in your blood that harm your heart even after you ate badly & didn’t exercise enough to gain it.

You can take supplements such as niacin that we posted on yesterday, sterol supplements, and chromium polynicotinate, and alpha lipoic acid, and omega 3 supplements to combat these effects. And if you are too fat, I think you should consider doing all of the above for this reason.

You can even roll the dice on side effects by taking statins. But if you do that, be sure to take CoQ10 or the ubiquinol it changes into; & get the regular liver tests and stop taking them if you develop bad side effects.

But these methods work massively better to prevent heart disease &/or only do so enough to save you from dying of heart disease if you learn to eat right and do regular exercise. The reason is that eating right and doing regular exercise act on the causes of the problems.

4. The fourth reason that being too fat goes with the rate of fatal heart disease so well is that people who are optimistic, proactive, and well informed are less likely to get fat and more successful in losing it if they gain it AND in taking intelligent steps to protect their health.

They’ll try out switching from soft drinks to tea or coffee or low sodium vegetable juice or cranberry juice.

They’ll get their HDL, LDL, triglycerides, fasting glucose, and HBA1C tested from time to time.

They’ll figure out how to add exercise each week, even if it’s only 10 minutes a day at home.

People who are too pessimistic, ignorant, and unwilling to try new things or to learn how to protect themselves tend to get and stay fat and then suffer the consequences.


The truly frightening news that it will cause even more severe economic hardship for everyone if the unnecessarily high health care costs from people not learning and acting on this information keep getting worse.

Demographic trends are extremely predictive unless very powerfully changed on a large scale. So, since the number of fat and sedentary kids is at record levels and still increasing, we may be in for some horrible economic news in another 10 to 30 years because of such increases in health care costs.