HEALTH DIVIDEND FROM LIPOSUCTION HARD TO FIND

[Guest guest]

DATE: June 25, 2004

http://www.diabetesnews.com/archive.html

 

Liposuctioning your waistline can make you look just fabulous, but it won't

necessarily make you healthier.

 

In a study, obese women who dropped up to 10.35 kilograms (23 pounds) of belly

fat by way of liposuction did not appear to lower their risk of diabetes or

heart disease, both of which are fat-related.

 

It is a frustrating and surprising finding to researchers who believed that

surgically removing fat would help restore a healthier body chemistry.

 

" It's not how much fat you remove, but how you remove the fat that is really

what is more important, " said lead study author Dr. Samuel Klein, at Washington

University in St. Louis. " We have to go back to the same old traditional

recommendation of lose weight and be more physically active. "

 

Liposuction is the United States' most popular form of cosmetic surgery. About

400,000 fat-sucking liposuction procedures are done every year in this country.

 

The latest study, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine,

involved 15 obese women who underwent cosmetic liposuction.

 

The women's blood chemistry and pressure, which reflect the risk of diabetes and

heart disease, were checked before surgery and about three months after. While

the women were slimmer afterward, their medical profiles were almost identical.

 

Body fat has been increasingly tied to diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other

diseases in recent years. It turns out that fat doesn't just make the heart pump

harder; fat cells churn out a brew of metabolic products that can harm health.

 

The notion that surgically removing fat should help restore a healthier

chemistry to the body still cannot be completely discarded. For one thing, this

study involved a small number of people, and all of them women.

 

Also, Barbara Corkey, a Boston Medical Center biochemist who is president of the

North American Association for the Study of Obesity, said the liposuction may

have left too much body fat behind or siphoned away the wrong kind of fat.

 

The surgery removed only belly fat, leaving untouched a deeper layer of what is

known as visceral fat. The deeper fat may prove to be more dangerous. It feeds

metabolic products more directly into the pancreas, which manufactures the

hormone insulin. It is insulin production or metabolism that goes haywire in

diabetics.

 

Visceral fat is harder, but not impossible, to trim by surgery.

 

Ultimately, doctors may find that fat cells need to shrink in size, and not just

number, to restore a healthier chemical balance. Dieting does make fat cells

smaller.

 

It may also be that the body needs to run an energy deficit, through dieting and

exercise, to switch on healthier fat chemistry.

 

The liposuction research suggests that " even if one could suddenly remove the

fat tissue per se, you really haven't changed the underlying process, " said Dr.

David Kelley, who runs the Obesity and Nutrition Research Center at the

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

________________

 

JoAnn Guest

mrsjoguest

DietaryTipsForHBP

www.geocities.com/mrsjoguest/Genes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AIM Barleygreen

" Wisdom of the Past, Food of the Future "

 

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