Obesity has links to a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, including dementia. But more important than simply having body fat is where that fat is located. That might make all the difference in determining how rapidly your brain ages.
According to a new study published in Nature Mental Health by researchers at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, your bathroom scale and the possibly unreliable metric of BMI might not be giving you a complete understanding of your body fat and how it relates to your health, particularly your brain’s health.
Two people can weigh exactly the same, have identical BMIs, and still have totally different risks for cognitive decline depending on where their fat is on their bodies.
Visceral Fat May Be Worse for Your Brain Than BMI Suggests
After analyzing brain scans, body fat measurements, and cognitive tests from more than 18,000 participants in the UK Biobank, researchers found that fat stored in different parts of the body affects the brain in distinct ways. Arm, leg, and “trunk” fat (the researchers’ term for torso fat, which encompasses the chest, belly, and back) were each linked to changes in specific brain regions involved in movement, memory, and emotion. But visceral fat was the biggest indicator. That’s the fat packed around your internal organs.
Think of your brain’s white matter as the all-important cabling that lets different regions of your brain communicate with each other. Visceral fat stomps all over those cables, and it’s the only type of fat associated with damage to white matter. The researchers suspect that chronic inflammation caused by visceral fat may be causing severe damage that accelerates brain aging and increases the risk of dementia.
All this extra belly fat might be causing these catastrophic brain changes, though the researchers can’t quite yet definitively prove it. There’s also the matter of the study not exactly being diverse, as most of its 18,000 participants were white British adults.
There’s also the matter of the study’s scans not being able to distinguish between subcutaneous fat (the fat just under the skin) and visceral fat, the belly fat that surrounds your organs. Science has, for some years now, known that visceral fat around the organs has been linked to a wide range of health issues, not just neurodegenerative ones, like diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Luckily, it’s a fat you can actually do something about. Changing your diet, hitting the gym, or using GLP-1 weight loss medications could reduce that visceral belly fat, helping you reduce your waistline while saving your brain at the same time.
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