It pays to be a little hippie

Well, I used to be a little hippie, and life was good if not lucrative. These days, however, research suggests that those who wear dessert upon their hips have less risk of heart disease compared to those who waist their fat.

This 'apple' vs. 'pear' thing has been known for some time. Abdominal obesity--that fat which is packed under your abdominal muscles and around your organs--is metabolically active, producing inflammatory molecules such as c-reactive protein and interleukin-6 which hasten the formation of cholesterol plaque in the arteries. How do you know where your fat resides? Lie on your back. If your fat puddles off to the side, gotta love it as it's stowed beneath your skin. Does it sit firmly above your body in the supine position like a late-term pregnancy? That's the bad visceral stuff.

This study from the UK was published in the latest edition of Circulation. The Cambridge docs showed that waist-to-hip ratio was a more important predictor of heart disease risk than BMI*. In other words, given similar degrees of overweight, the bigger the hips relative to the waistline, the less the risk of keeling over with a heart attack.

The researchers took it one step further. Even considering various cardiovascular risk factors like smoking and age, their analysis indicated that for every increase of 2.5 inches in hip circumference for men and for roughly 3.5 inches in women, risk of developing CHD was reduced by 20%.

If you're thinking what I was thinking, Dr. Dexter Cannoy has a final note of caution for both of us: We're not saying people should develop a big hip circumference to protect themselves from risk, but for any body size, those with bigger hips tended to be associated with lower risk...
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*BMI combines height and weight in a single number and, on average, the higher the BMI, the higher the body fat except in the well-muscled young.