By David Blyweiss, M.D., Advanced Natural Wellness

February 15, 2012

• What makes belly fat so dangerous
• Losing “love handles” for a longer, healthier life
• Is diet soda making you fat?

Whether you choose to smoke or not, you know the risks: lung cancer, emphysema, premature death. By now, we all do.

Well, I predict our understanding of belly fat is about to become just that crystal clear. Poking at your “beer belly” won’t be considered funny at all. Vanity will become the last of your concerns.

When you look in the mirror, you won’t be worried about bathing suit season. You’ll be stressed about getting heart disease, diabetes, and autoimmune disorder.

Research is revealing, in gory detail, just how toxic the stored fat around your belly can be… and how detrimental it is to your health. It’s not good, to say the least.

By the end of this article, you’re likely to ditch your scale and start packing a tape measure in your robe pocket. And you just might want to start monitoring the size of your waist more carefully than your weight…

Most people consider fat nothing more than overeaten, unused calories. It collects inside our bodies and turns into clumps of plump, useless cells.

Thanks to recent research, we are getting a much more complex picture of what fat is and how it works. And a few clues about how to get rid of it.

Fat stores vitamins and nutrients for us to keep us from starving during times of famine or scarcity. This is a good thing. But it harbors just as many, if not more, health dangers, such as:

• fat-soluble organic pollutants such as pesticides linked to higher incidence of cancer, nervous system disorders and reproductive damage
• inflammatory cytokines that can cause autoimmune disease
• excess estrogen that can increase risks of heart attack, stroke, and prostate disease in men and reproductive cancers in women

It turns out fat tissue is a very active and complex part of our metabolic system. It is essentially an endocrine organ. Much like the thyroid or the pituitary gland, fat can produce and excrete hormones.
You see, there are three types of fat:

• subcutaneous, which is found underneath the skin
• intramuscular, which weaves around the skeletal muscle
• visceral fat, which is packed around your middle, and is also called organ fat or intra-abdominal fat.

Each type of fat collects in different areas of the body, and functions differently within your system, as well. Fat accumulated in the lower body (the pear shape) is subcutaneous, while fat in the abdominal area (the apple shape) is largely visceral.

Visceral fat in particular is linked to high cholesterol, high insulin, high triglycerides, high blood pressure and other problems.

Detecting visceral fat can be difficult. It actually doesn’t show up until it’s a problem. So if you only monitor your weight and your clothing size, you can still be carrying around too much visceral fat.

While we don’t know the optimal waist measurement for health, we do know how much is too much:

Men whose waists are wider than 40 inches and women whose waists are wider than 35 inches are at greatest risk of developing health problems from too much belly fat.

That number isn’t random. A landmark study in Europe found men and women with waists at or above this size had roughly double the risk of premature death as men and women with the smallest waists (less than 34 inches for men and 28 for women.) They also found that every 2-inch increase in waist circumference came with a 17% increase in mortality in men and a 13% increase in women.

Those aren’t “love handles,” my friend. They are life handles! And the faster you lose them, the better your chances are of living a longer, healthier life.

But how?

Most mainstream publications and practitioners will give the usual advice: diet and exercise. That’s a good place to start. Click here to download my Free Report “The Resolution Report: Five Steps To your Healthiest Year Yet” to get started in these areas today.

But plenty of people diet and exercise, and don’t lose an inch around their middle. So what’s the problem?

It could be one of the leading hidden causes of visceral fat: diet soda. Or more specifically, artificial sweeteners like aspartame. That’s right. The very ingredient most people consume when they’re on a diet.

When you ingest the toxic chemical aspartame it’s absorbed from the intestines. Then it passes immediately to the liver. When the liver breaks down or metabolizes aspartame, it becomes three distinct components: phenylalanine, aspartic acid and methanol. And all three are toxic!

A heavy load of toxins leads to an overworked liver. This can cause a build up of fat inside the liver cells – appropriately named “fatty liver” – making it extremely difficult to lose weight.

This means the very drinks being sold to you as “diet” drinks are actually causing you to gain weight more easily, and making it harder to lose it!

Aspartame also causes weight gain in other ways. It wreaks havoc with your blood sugar levels, which increases your appetite and makes you crave sweets and sugar. And it makes you retain fluid, giving you a puffy and bloated appearance. This can make you look fatter than you are and even increase cellulite.

There are other causes of growing waistlines, for sure. Some are related to hormonal imbalances. For others it is lack of exercise, and simply, how your body stores fat.

But if there are easy obvious ways to lose it – such as ditching the aspartame – I’d certainly recommend starting there.

References:

Pischon, T. General and Abdominal Adiposity and Risk of Death in Europe. The New England Journal of Medicine, Nov. 12, 2008; vol 359: pp 2105-2120.

Maersk M, et. al., Sucrose-sweetened beverages increase fat storage in the liver, muscle, and visceral fat depot: a 6-mo randomized intervention study. Am J Clin Nutr. 2011 Dec 28. [Epub ahead of print]