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This is why your pot belly is dangerous

Your pot belly may not be as harmless as you may think it is.

A new study has revealed that people that tend to have extra weight around the middle area of their bodies tend to have a lower long-term survival rate as compared to those that are obese.

In a comprehensive research aimed at discovering whether people store excess fat around the mid-region of their bodies, findings revealed that men with a normal BMI but a pot belly at risk two times than those that are overweight or obese.

“The lack of recognition of this leads people with abnormal distribution of fat to have a false sense of safety or reassurance that they don’t need to exercise or they can eat whatever they want because they are “skinny” when in reality, if a person has a normal BMI and an abnormal waist size the risk is worse than if they have a high BMI,” said the study’s author Dr. Fransisco Lopez-Jimenez of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

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How the study was conducted

Researchers gathered and analyzed more than 15,000 adults from 1988 to 1994. They did a follow up in 2006.

40 percent of the participants were of normal weight while 35 percent were overweight and 25 percent obese.

70 percent of those studied were found to be obese around the mid-region of their bodies. This simply means that their waist to hip ratio was at least 0.85 while for men it was at least 0.90 – this is according to WHO.

Within a period of 14 years, there were 3222 deaths with 1404 of those deaths being as a result of cardiovascular disease.

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Further reports indicated that men with a pot belly had a 78 percent higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease as compared to men that had a similar BMI but no fat around the belly area.

For women the risk doubled.

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