The Other Waist Ratio

We’ve written before about the use of the waist-to-hip ratio as a health risk calculator, because it’s a lot better than BMI.

Before we proceed, let’s take a moment for our time-honored tradition of first briefly laying waste to BMI as a putative reckoner of individual health:

What’s wrong with BMI?

Oof, what isn’t wrong with BMI?

In short, it was developed as a demographic-based tool to specifically chart the weight-related health of working-age European white men a little under 200 years ago.

This means that if you are, perchance, not a working-age European white man in 1830 or so, then it’s not so useful. It’d be like first establishing height norms based on NBA basketball players, and then applying it to the general population, and thus coming to the conclusion that someone who is 6’2″ is very short.

In long, we did a deep-dive into it here, and in particular what things go dangerously wrong when it’s applied to women, non-white people, athletic people, pregnant people, people under 16 or over 65 and more:

When BMI Doesn’t Quite Measure Up

Now, a quick note on waist-to-hip ratio:

The ratio of your waist to hips (in circumference) is a strong indicator of not just cardiovascular disease risk, but also all-cause mortality.

Now, that’s not too surprising, considering that cardiovascular disease is a top killer and other top killers are often metabolically linked (diabetes, stroke, etc, arguably even cancer as it is in part a dysfunction of cellular metabolism; see for example What Your Metabolism Says About How Aggressive Breast Cancer Is Likely To Be For You), and that medical malpractice is often proportional to a patient’s weight (see: Fat’s Real Barriers To Health) which is definitely a major factor too.

You can read about waist-to-hip ratio (including how to calculate it, and what numbers are ideal (or risky) for women and men, here: Better Than BMI

A new contender: waist-to-height ratio!

This one’s “the other waist ratio” mentioned in the title.

A Swedish research team, namely Dr. Amra Jujic et al., looked at 1,792 participants aged 45–73 (mean average age 67) from the Malmö Preventive Project, their waist-to-height ratios (henceforth “WtHR” as used in the study), and how they fared over an average of just under 13 years (like any longitudinal study investigating potentially fatal results, not every participant was there for the entire length of the study, due to dying during it).

In this case, 132 heart failure events (i.e. not all of them fatal) occurred during follow-up.

Higher WtHR was linked to a significantly greater risk of heart failure, with (simplifying rather here for brevity), the following statistical considerations:

• Participants had a median average WtHR of 0.57
• Each standard deviation increase in WtHR raised heart failure risk by 34%, independent of other factors.
• Participants in the highest WtHR quartile (median 0.65) had nearly triple the heart failure risk compared to those in lower quartiles.

What this means in simpler terms: you want to be twice as tall as your waist is round.

In other words, and picking an easy number for clarity: someone who is 6ft wants to ideally have a waist circumference of 36 inches (36 inches being 3ft, i.e. half of 6ft) or less.

Most people (based on the Swedish population sample, anyway; American average size may differ) have a WtHR of very slightly more than that, i.e. a 6ft person will, on average, per the Malmö study, have a waist circumference of 40 inches.

Those who were in the highest-risk group had, on average (again using the 6ft height for arithmetical simplicity here) a waist circumference of 47 inches.

Now, in reality, not everyone is 6ft tall. So if for example you are 5ft tall, that ideal waist circumference becomes 30 inches or less, and the highest-risk threshold becomes 39 inches.

The paper itself isn’t yet publicly available, but you can read a pop-science article about it here:

Waist-to-height ratio predicts heart failure incidence, study indicates

Want to trim up?

If you’ve crunched the numbers and found your ratio is a bit higher than you’d like it to be, then here are some of our resources:

• How To Lose Weight (Healthily!)
• Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It
• The Real Way To Shrink Your Waist & Train Your Core

Take care!