How To Make Your Body Fat Heart-Healthier

It matters where and how fat is stored, and the good news is, you can influence that!

Where it goes

Firstly, there’s an important distinction between subcutaneous fat (the squishable stuff just underneath your skin) and visceral fat (you can’t squish this; it’s under your abdominal muscles, surrounding your organs).

Subcutaneous fat is good in moderation, with a fairly wide margin for error. The healthiest body fat percentages are (assuming normal hormones) generally considered to be in the range of 20–25% for women and 15–20% for men. You can read more about this here: Is A Visible Six-Pack Obtainable Regardless Of Genetic Predisposition?

Visceral fat is generally bad. We technically do need some, but almost everyone has either the right amount or too much, and its presence is very strongly associated with metabolic health problems, well beyond the kind of health risks that can be attributed to systemic failures in the healthcare system when it comes to those with merely more subcutaneous fat than most (see: Fat’s Real Barriers To Health). So whereas subcutaneous fat tends to get scapegoated a lot for largely unrelated things, excess visceral fat is genuinely an undeniable problem metabolically.

We wrote more about visceral fat, here: Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It ← “visceral belly fat” is actually a redundant tautology repeated more than once unnecessarily (since the only place we get it is the viscera of the abdominal cavity), but including both terms makes the article easier to find when using our website’s search function 😉

Recently (the paper was published two days ago, at time of writing) researchers (Dr. Vladimir Losev et al.) analysed UK Biobank data from 21,241 people, using whole body and heart imaging and AI to calculate a “heart age” compared with chronological age.

What they found: excess visceral fat around organs was linked to faster aging of the heart and blood vessels, even in people who appear fit and have a “healthy” BMI.

We put that “healthy” in quotation marks there, because BMI isn’t very reliable for anything, and in this study, BMI didn’t predict heart age well, showing that fat location is more important than overall weight. See also: When BMI Doesn’t Quite Measure Up

Why this happens: people think of fat as being “just there”, but in reality it’s metabolically active, releasing cytokines, hormones, and chemokines; visceral fat promotes insulin resistance, inflammation, and lipid problems, while subcutaneous fat differs developmentally and functionally

They also found: hormonally-driven sex differences, notably that women have less visceral fat (54% of men’s level) but more subcutaneous fat (38% higher), and as such:

• men with “apple-shaped” fat distribution (belly fat) showed faster heart aging
• women with “pear-shaped” fat (hips and thighs) had slower heart aging

… and, confirming that hypothesis further, higher estrogen levels were found to be protective against heart aging.

For more on that, see: What Menopause Does To The Heart

As for this study we’ve been talking about, you can read the paper in full here: Sex-specific body fat distribution predicts cardiovascular ageing

What to do about it

Firstly, see our previous article: Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It for the dos and don’ts of getting healthier (which for most people means: lower) visceral fat levels.

Next up, see also: Body Fat & Pelvic Floor Problems: What Matters Most Is Where The Fat Is for more about those “apple or pear” distributions, and how to switch it up.

You may also be wondering: Can We Do Fat Redistribution? And the answer is yes, and we are doing it all the time whether we want to or not, so we might as well know what things affect our fat distribution in various body parts. The article we just linked there shows how.

While we’re at it, one other place you really don’t want excess fat, for metabolic reasons, is your liver. So: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

One more thing…

Did you know that even our subcutaneous fat is divided into kinds that are “better” or “worse” than others?

Learn about it here: The BAT-pause! ← this is about Brown Adipose Tissue (the best kind of subcutaneous fat) and how/why its levels often lower with menopause, and what to do about it.

Take care!