Study to weigh up body fat and health risks
massey-university
Thu Apr 02 2009 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)
Study to weigh up body fat and health risks
Thursday, 2 April 2009, 4:14 pm
Press Release: Massey University
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Study to weigh up body fat and health risks
A study using the newest technology for measuring body fat is set to challenge conventional views of what constitutes healthy female body weight.
Women who think they are overweight may discover they are not, and slim types may be alerted to hidden flab and its associated health risks, says lead researcher Dr Rozanne Kruger.
Researchers from the Institute of Food, Nutrition and Human Health have been overwhelmed with responses from women wanting to take part in the study, she says. Using the BodPod machine, which accurately measures body fat and muscle using air displacement technology, they are investigating the variations in body fat percentage and body weight against the benchmark Body Mass Index, or BMI, which reflects weight in relation to height.
“Although BMI is measured and calculated easily, it does not determine how much fat mass and fat-free mass a person has,” says Dr Kruger, who is conducting the study with doctoral researcher Kathryn Beck.
"Women may have a normal BMI but a high percentage of body fat that could affect their health.”
And It is also possible for some apparently slim women to have unhealthy levels of fatty deposits around internal cavities and organs. “Not all fat is subcutaneous,” says Dr Kruger. “We want to investigate whether women with a normal BMI and a high body fat percentage will have a similar metabolic risk to those women with a high BMI and a high body fat percentage or higher risk than women with a normal body fat percentage and BMI."
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BMI is calculated using weight in reference to height and is often used to determine if a person is overweight. But, because muscle weighs more than fat, some people may incorrectly think they are overweight.
An average All Black, for example, would be considered technically overweight according to the BMI scale because of the weight of their additional muscle bulk, says Dr Kruger.
As well as measuring body fat and muscle mass against BMI, the researchers want to find out more about participants’ eating habits, appetites, physical activity as well as their cholesterol, certain hormones and blood sugar levels, in order to gain a full picture of how weight correlates to other health factors.
And while they are primarily interested in women with normal BMI but high body fat, they want to study a range of body types in women aged between 18 and 44 who are non-smokers, not pregnant or breastfeeding and not suffering chronic disease or taking medication.
Dr Kruger says she hopes the study, involving 120 women and funded by the Massey University Research Fund, will provide a better understanding of body composition profiles and how it relates to health and disease risk specific for New Zealanders. It is planned to eventually extend the study to other population groups.
The results, she says, may surprise and reassure many women that good health is not reflected in one idealised and unrealistic "super model" shape, weight and size but is related to a raft of individual measures.
The study follows earlier work on the weight measurement and body image by other Massey academics, including the recent Adult Identity Development Project to examine the “obesity myth” by College of Education researcher and lecturer Dr Cat Pause. Dr Steve Stannard, an expert in human body composition and his colleague Mr Matthew Barnes, from the Institute of Food, Nutrition and Human Health, examined pitfalls in the use of Body Mass Index for assessing health insurance premiums in 2007, and Dr Jennifer Carryer’s 1997 doctoral thesis, A Feminist Appraisal of the Experience of Embodied Largeness:a challenge for nursing, explored social and health stigmas experienced by larger-sized women.
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