Experts Chew the Fat over Asian Obesity Guidelines
Wed Jul 10,10:48 AM ET

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Health experts gathered in Singapore this week to ponder whether guidelines on obesity are suitable for Asians as worrying weight-related trends emerge across the region.

The body mass index (BMI) has been the international standard for determining if a person is overweight or obese. Obesity was declared a disease in its own right in 1997.

The first World Health Organization ( news - web sites) (WHO) gathering of its kind studied data from 10 Asian countries including China, Japan, India and several Southeast Asian states.

About 15% of men and 16% of women in mainland China were overweight, alongside 31% of males and 27% of females in Hong Kong. Some 21% of Japanese men and 24% of women were fat.

WHO found that in Southeast Asia, 16% of Thai men and 18% of Thai women were overweight, while in the Philippines 17% of the men and 23% of women were overweight.

"For some of these Asian populations, this seemed like a relatively low prevalence of obesity but there was still a lot of obesity-related complications like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke," Professor Boyd Swinburn of Australia's Deakin University School of Health Sciences told reporters at the conference on Wednesday.

"The fact that there are differences in body frame size and body build has pushed us down this track of re-identifying what the evidence is for the (BMI) definitions for Asian populations."

BMI is calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by height in meters squared. A BMI of 25 kg/m2 is considered overweight and 30 kg/m2 is obese for all population groups.

BMI is an easy-to-calculate "surrogate for obesity," especially in large studies, said Dr. Tommaso Cavalli-Sforza, a WHO regional adviser for nutrition and food safety.

FAT PLAYS A PART

But BMI also had to be considered in relation to body fat composition or a person's fat levels, experts said. A Singapore man of the same height and weight as a Caucasian, for instance, typically had a higher percentage of body fat, said Dr. Mabel Yap, a director of research at Singapore's Health Promotion Board.

"If the population has predispositions, for other reasons that we may not understand then a small amount of fat, especially if it's in the mid-section, is (a) very powerful risk," said Professor Shiriki Kumanyika of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

"Some of the countries like India, for example, have extremely high risks at levels of weight that you would not expect to have obesity-related risks," she said.

"A small increase in weight might be associated with a four-fold increase in development of diabetes."

A modification or addition to BMI guidelines for Asians will have implications for health policies and general practitioners in how they evaluate patients at risk.

But one trend was clear in the link between body weight and weight-related diseases.

"There is a greater risk of developing these complications as your BMI goes up. That seems to be consistent," Kumanyika said.


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...guidelines_dc_1

Maybe they're finally on the road to figuring out that BMI is largely erroneous.

What they really need to do is figure an accurate, easy way to measure body fat percentage. That's a much better guage of overweight/obesity.

;-Deb