How Related Are Weight And Health? – Comments

August 15, 2008

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Yesterdays post was about analysis of NHANES data that showed that body weight and health are not always related. The analysis looked at “metabolic markers of obesity” which were high triglycerides, low levels of HDL (the good) cholesterol, high level of fasting glucose and high blood pressure. The data demonstrated that there are some people who are “overweight” that do not have metabolic markers of obesity, and some people who are “normal” weight who have the metabolic markers.

For some diseases there is a straightforward genetic relationship. You have a particular form of a gene you get the disease. For many other diseases it is not so straightforward. There are a number of factors and genes that have can interact and affect whether you get the disease, and also how severely you get it.

With this in mind the data in that being normal weight or overweight does not completely correlate with whether a person has the metabolic markers makes more sense.

Some people will have a combination of genes that makes them very susceptible to having, as an example, high triglycerides. For these people they are going have high triglycerides whatever. The triglyceride levels will probably be even higher if they are overweight vs normal, but even if really skinny they will probably have high triglycerides.

Other lucky people will have a combination of genes that makes it unlikely that they will ever get high triglycerides, high fasting glucose etc., whatever their weight and lifestyle.

Most of us fall in the middle ground. The combinations of our genes make us susceptible to getting the metabolic markers of obesity. For us, an increase in weight is a strong negative interacting factor. Introduction of this strong factor (weight gain) into the mix will make it more likely that we will get one or more markers, or if we already have any, that they will get worse. For many in this category, putting on weight, particularly round the middle is going to be unhealthy.

If you read the previous post and looked at the percentages, you would have noticed that as people aged the likelihood increased, whatever their body weight, that they would have markers of obesity. This suggests that age is an independent interacting factor for getting the metabolic markers. Previously, the increase in the metabolic markers with age has often been suggested to be due to the fact that we tend to put on weight as we age. While this is true, this data suggests, that since the increase in metabolic markers occurred in normal weight participants too, that age itself plays a role.

So for the majority of people, with regards to the metabolic markers, though we can try to keep our weight down, unfortunately, we cannot stop aging.

Technorati Tags: weight, metabolic, age, genes, triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, NHANES