What Your Waistline Says About Your Health

Many people believe that the measurement of one's waistline has a great connection to his or her health. However, doctors claim that there is nothing absolute with this link.

According to Live Science, Dr. Bruce Y. Lee explained that more studies on other factors should be done on people to arrive at a conclusion about their health. "Any cutoff is not an absolute, hard cutoff. It's not as if someone at 34.9 is different from someone at 35.1," he added.

Studies in the past years, as per the same report, indicated that individuals especially women who had waists larger than 35 inches are said to have a higher risk of having heart illnesses than those whose measurements are lower. It also claimed that they are more prone to getting cancer and other health issues.

The Harvard School of Public Health cited a Shanghai Women's Health research which claimed that people with more fat in the abdomen have a higher risk of dying than those with normal weight. It claimed that fats in the stomach usually causes high cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar.

However, University of Minnesota Obesity Prevention Center professor and co-director Lisa Harnack told LiveScience that having a big waistline is just one of the many risk factors for heart diseases and diabetes. She claimed that is is just one of the "many measures of health" but is not conclusive on its own.

"The real issue is that each of these measurements is only a single view into the person," added Dr. Lee. He noted that one measurement in the body cannot tell everything about a person's overall health.

The two specialists revealed that those with big stomachs can be as unhealthy as those who starve themselves and are very thing. On the other hand, they noted that maintaining a small and healthy stomach would help improve one's health.