Visceral Fat: Why It Matters & How To Improve It

Dr. Ruth Machin demystifies it:

At the core of things

Visceral fat is fat stored deep inside your abdominal cavity, underneath your abdominal wall muscles, surrounding your organs. As such, it’s different from subcutaneous fat (under your skin, the fat you can squish from the outside), and belongs to the broader category of ectopic fat (ectopic = “out of place”).

While it’s fine for your organs to have a little padding, the problem with excess visceral fat is that it secretes pro-inflammatory adipokines that drive insulin resistance, raise the risk of type 2 diabetes, promote hypertension, contribute to heart disease, and generally bring about (or exacerbate) metabolic syndrome in general.

Although overall weight gain in midlife comes mostly from age and reduced activity, not menopause itself, menopause is a factor—because declining estrogen levels result in the body shifting fat storage from hips and thighs, towards your midsection, increasing visceral fat.

How to measure visceral fat: it cannot be seen externally; waist-to-height ratio is a better guide than BMI; thresholds above 0.5 signal increased risk; imaging such as MRI is required for accurate measurement in research.

Still, if you have a smart scale, it’ll do a decent estimate for you as part of its body composition test, based on conductivity. Just remember, it’s not accurate, so in that case, worry less about the actual numbers, and more about the trends (e.g. whether the visceral fat score is going up or down over time or remaining the same).

Some notes from Dr. Machin on dietary considerations:

• Diet quality for reducing visceral fat: research shows that a mild (!) calorie deficit combined with avoiding saturated fats but enjoying low-GI carbohydrates (i.e: get plenty of fiber with your carbs) reduces visceral fat.
• Whole-food approaches that work: both low-carb and higher carb diets with unprocessed foods reduce visceral fat; avoiding added sugars and refined carbohydrates improves insulin resistance and abdominal fat patterns. No surprises here.
• Why the Mediterranean diet is effective: it promotes whole grains, beans, legumes, olive oil, fish, fruit, vegetables, and nuts; it supports cardiovascular health and reduces visceral fat more effectively than low-fat or low-carb diets in the long term.
• Extra benefits from polyphenols: the green Mediterranean diet, enriched with walnuts, green tea, and other polyphenol-dense foods, produced larger visceral fat reductions than the standard Mediterranean diet in clinical trials.
• Foods rich in polyphenols to include: dark berries, green and black tea, nuts with skins (e.g. almonds!), extra virgin olive oil, cocoa, ground flaxseed, red onions, dark green vegetables, and soy; these all improve waist circumference and metabolic markers.
• Overall eating guidance: enjoy unprocessed whole foods, keep added sugars low, avoid sugary drinks especially, replace refined carbohydrates with whole grains, and aim for a diet you can maintain for decades rather than weeks.

For more on all of this, enjoy:

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Take care!