14 DAY TRIAL // Women striving to become thinner so that they fit the current beauty standard imposed by stars like Victoria Beckham and Keira Knightley should consider their diet plans twice before getting through with it. A new study comes to confirm the findings of older research, namely that storage of fat on the body, especially on the posterior and the thighs, is desirable, as LiveScience can confirm.
This is not a new idea, as we were telling you about a year ago that research into this goes long back. Fat stored on the backside and the thighs can actually help the organism fight certain diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease. Oppositely, fat around the abdomen does no such thing, wherefrom the conclusion that having a pear shaped body is not only an indicator of good health, but also something that women should aspire to.
“The fact that body fat’s distribution is quite important for your health has been known for some time now,” lead researcher Konstantinos Manolopoulos of the University of Oxford in England says of the findings of this new study. The only thing missing right now is the ability to determine how the body stores fat, so that it can be used in disease prevention. “Once this is understood then one could think about therapeutic approaches to make use of that. Maybe to make use [of it] in a preventive way by redistributing the fat,” the researcher explains.
“Stomach fat is considered more metabolically active than lower body fat. While that may sound good, as this fat breaks down easily, the result is a release of substances called cytokines, which have been linked to cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance and diabetes. In fact, research on mice reported in 2008 revealed that belly fat boosts inflammation and is linked with hardening of the arteries – known to increase the risk of heart attacks. But scientists think lower body fat, like that around the hips and thighs, produces beneficial hormones that protect against these diseases, though more research is needed to firm up this expectation,” LiveScience also says of the findings.
As Manolopoulos also puts it, the saying “One moment on the lips, forever on the hips” is true, because fat stored on the posterior and thighs never really goes away. Now, all that science has to do is to determine how it can shift fat from the abdomen to these two areas and women should be – at least in theory – safe from a series of diseases.