Fat on the Inside

I've been thinking a lot about this since attending a talk on childhood obesity at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival. Dr. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and professor at Harvard Medical School, as well as the author of "Ending the Food Fight: Guide Your Child to a Healthy Weight in a Fast Food/Fake Food World", discussed the fact that doctors and scientists are now finding fat around internal organs, like the liver, and that this will be a serious health problem in the near future. It was the first I'd heard of it, but it wouldn't have been if I'd read an article that my brother sent me back in May (he sends me a lot of articles).

Futurist Ray Kurzweil publishes a newsletter that has all kinds of cutting edge information, and in his May 14th issue, he includes an article called "Thin People Can Be Fat on the Inside". This basically says it all -

"According to the data, people who maintain their weight through diet rather than exercise are likely to have major deposits of internal fat, even if they are otherwise slim. “The whole concept of being fat needs to be redefined,” said Bell, whose research is funded by Britain’s Medical Research Council."

I watched an episode of Penn & Teller's show on Showtime recently; one in which they sought to disprove the obesity epidemic. The argument they proposed did not convince me, and one of the main reasons for that was a physical fitness test they conducted in which the control was a very obviously out of shape guy, but one who happened to be thin(ish). He didn't win a single event. Wow, Penn, you're some sort of scientist. The obvious fact is that the guy didn't exercise, so someone who had a little more heft to him, but who was in better physical shape, beat him in various foot races and other events.

The point is that you need a proper diet and regular exercise to be healthy. We'll just keep beating that drum.