What Your Waistline Means to Your Health

The New England Journal of Medicine in a November 2008 issue published research that had tracked nearly 360,000 men and women in 9 European countries for nearly 10 years. The results confirm research that has proliferated in the U.S. medical literature that is, a full to bursting waistline is a stronger predictor of premature death than one’s overall weight.

It is called apple shaped weight deposition. Carrying your excess weight around your middle is correlated with insulin resistance, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, poor blood sugar control, acne, polycystic ovarian syndrome, male pattern baldness, and fatty liver, to name many of the symptoms that comprise this symptom complex called Syndrome X among other names. Adipose tissue is better termed ‘an organ’ that produces hormones that have total body effects.
The current medical approach of treating the respective symptoms individually, i.e. a pill for high cholesterol and another pill for high blood pressure is uniformly poor in the long run. Researchers like Loren Cordain, PhD at CO State University, author of The Paleo Diet, find their research falls on deaf ears in a medical system devoted to treating using prescriptions and procedures. There is no concerted public health effort to adopt this message even though the fastest growing group of type II diabetics is teenagers in the U.S.
The TN Medicaid system was convinced to reimburse chromium supplementation as a means of dealing with insulin resistance that underlies the medical conditions that consume billions of dollars in the treatment of chronic disease. Chromium is critical yet it is only one piece of the multifactoral lifestyle to address carrying excess weight around your waist.
Integrative medicine treats the bulging waistline and its healthcare consequences very effectively because it treats the whole person rather than the symptoms of the consequences of carrying weight around the waistline. While this study ended with the traditional call for more money for more study (further research should focus on whether treatment for weight problems should focus on preventing increases in waist size rather than holding down weight overall), perhaps the money is better spent to adopt integrative health practices into the prevention and treatment of chronic disease.
From Deborah A. Ray, MT(ASCP)
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