Health

No one likes abdominal fat. But you’ll hate it even more now that you know it’s trying to kill you.

By: Adam Campbell; Photographs: Terry Heffernan
[ Updated: Aug 26, 2008 - 6:26:08 PM ]

There may be days when you look in the mirror at your prodigious abdomen—built over many years through a strict regimen of foie gras and Trappist ale—and wonder whether it might not be better suited for a sumo wrestler. You would be wrong, in that case: A sumo wrestler’s belly is much healthier than the one you’re toting around.

Here’s why: There are two kinds of potbellies—soft ones and hard ones. And which kind you have may make all the difference in how long, and how well, you’re going to live.

According to a Japanese study, the fat on the bellies of sumo wrestlers is almost entirely subcutaneous. That means it’s located just under the skin, in front of the abdominal muscles—which is why the wrestlers’ bellies jiggle about like Jennie Finch’s sports bra. If you’re like most American men, however, you have a very different kind of belly—solid and round, as if you swallowed a hard hat or a miniature Volkswagen Bug. A belly like that is composed of visceral fat, which resides behind the abdominal muscles, surrounding your internal organs (viscera). That fat pushes the abdominal muscles outward, making them protrude into a hard, round gut.
And over the past decade, scientists have concluded that the rounder and harder your belly, the more it puts your health in danger.

For that to make sense, it’s important to understand that fat—any fat, subcutaneous or visceral—isn’t just lifeless tissue whose only duty is to make you cringe at the idea of taking your shirt off in public. “Fat is an endocrine organ that secretes numerous substances, collectively called ‘adipokines,’ many of which are harmful,” says Robert Ross, Ph.D., an exercise physiologist at Queen’s University in Canada who’s been studying the effects of lifestyle on visceral fat for 15 years. Adipokines include resistin, a hormone that leads to high blood sugar; angiotensinogen, a compound that raises blood pressure; adiponectin, a hormone that regulates the metabolism of lipids and glucose (amounts of this hormone decrease with increased visceral fat); and interleukin-6, a chemical associated with arterial inflammation. Of these substances, interleukin-6 is perhaps the most dangerous, because inflammation in your arteries can trigger pieces of plaque to break off and block the flow of blood to your heart. And because visceral fat is significantly more active than subcutaneous fat, it produces more of these hazardous secretions. Size also matters: The  larger a visceral fat cell grows, the more active it becomes.

You might liken the difference between subcutaneous and visceral fat to that of a dormant volcano compared to one that’s active. The latter is spewing out nasty stuff all the time; the other is just part of the landscape.

Now, here’s what all this means to you: If your belly is bulging with visceral fat, it’s likely that you have metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is a condition in which a person is inflicted with a cluster of heart-disease risk factors—specifically, a 36-inch (or greater) waist, and any two of these four maladies: high triglycerides (the fat in your blood), high blood sugar, low HDL cholesterol (the good kind), and high blood pressure. This combination increases the likelihood you’ll develop diabetes by 500 percent, have a heart attack by 300 percent, and die of a heart attack by 200 percent. (Become diabetic, and there’s an 80 percent chance you’ll die of heart disease.)

And that brings us back to the sumos.