Dear Readers

You probably read recently that a man was rejected as a bone marrow donor because his BMI (Body Mass Index) was too high as it put him into the obese category.  This was a man who was very fit and athletic and it was obvious that the weight was made up of muscle.  It is so sad that the BMI is still being used for categorising people into being overweight.  The Army has given up using the BMI as they were getting very fit rugby playing men applying who would actually have been obese according to the BMI criteria but were in fact very muscular with very little body fat.

The importance of where fat is distributed on the body is also crucial and that is why I wrote the Fat around the Middle book.  Further research in this area and published in the American Journal of Epidemiology only recently has highlighted again the relationship between waist circumference and risk of death.  In this study, they looked at 250,000 men and women over 9 years.  Within the group of people they looked at those whose BMI was classed as healthy and then within that group looked at the difference between those with a larger waist (more than 88cm (34.7ins)) for women and 102cm (40.2ins) for men).

So for those with a healthy weight according to the BMI, those women with the higher waist circumference had a 22% increased risk of death and the men with the larger waists had a 23% increased risk of death.

This message is so important, if you have extra fat around the middle of your body, it needs to be reduced.  Not only will your clothes fit better and you will be happier with how you look but the change in body shape will have an enormous impact on your health, now and in the future reducing your risk of cancer (especially breast cancer), heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure, diabetes and Alzheimer’s. 

Kind regards

Marilyn Glenville