Particularly visceral fat, that which accumulates around organs such as the liver and promotes metabolic diseases.
We think it makes you lose weight, that’s why we’re afraid to stop it. But this habit could actually make grow biggerparticularly at the level of belly, show researchers from the University of Copenhagen. They looked at data from two European studies on smoking exposure and measures of body fat distribution (e.g., waist-hip ratio and waist and hip circumference). The smoking study included 1.2 million people who started smoking and more than 450,000 lifelong smokers, and the body fat distribution study included more than 600,000 people. Then, they combined several genetic results from these studies to determine whether people with genes associated with smoking tended to have different body fat distribution. Other indicators such as alcohol consumption or socio-economic background were taken into account to ensure that any link found between smoking and fat distribution was actually due to smoking and not other factors. .
Lower body weight but…
According to their results published in the journal “Addiction”, although smokers generally have lower body weight, they tend to have more abdominal fat than non-smokers. Researchers confirm that “Starting and lifelong smoking can lead to increased belly fat.” “We also found that the type of fat that is increasing is more likely to be visceral fat rather than fat located just under the skin“, adds Dr. Germán D. Carrasquilla, lead author of the study.
A fat dangerous for the liver
Visceral fat, present around the viscera of the stomach (like the liver for example), is the most dangerous for health and is not necessarily visible. A person may have a flat stomach and a dangerous amount of visceral fat, increasing the risk of serious illness. This fat increases the risk of cardiac diseaseof diabetesofstroke, dementia and liver diseases. So the 15 million French people who smoke, 12 million of them daily, must be aware of this additional deleterious effect of tobacco on their health. “From a public health perspective, these findings reinforce the importance of large-scale efforts to prevent and reduce smoking in the general population, as this could also help reduce abdominal visceral fat and all chronic diseases which are linked to it. Reducing a major health risk in the population will indirectly reduce another major health risk” concludes the author of the study.