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Comment by jamesgill | Hacker News Reader

A nitpick about the title: Not strictly abdominal fat, but visceral abdominal fat, which surrounds the organs. Not all abdominal fat is visceral; in fact, in many people the majority is not. The article mentions visceral early on, which is the subject.

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If you have a lot of abdominal fat then you also have visceral fat so it's just a proxy

This is not true.

It is what is called “skinny fat“.

If you are skinny fat you still have noticeable abdominal fat. You might not see it when somebody has a t-shirt on but it's still very obvious

To put this another way skinny fat just means you are not overweight but you have a high body fat percentage (eg lacking lean mass). So while you might not look like the average American there will still be significant visible abdominal fat, likely love handles, etc

It's not a remotely good proxy

Seriously, you don't think there's a connection between visceral fat and abdominal fat even though there's plenty of evidence that there is along with just common sense?

It's just a particular type of abdominal fat so obviously the more abdominal fat that you can see it means you also have more of the type that can't see as well... It's not that complicated

The amount of body fat and ways the body stores fat are highly uncorrelated for people who are not severely obese, and severe obesity itself might be made worse over time by high levels of visceral fat.

Yes visceral fat is metabolically active so it can make you more fat

But I'm not sure why you think you can have a lot of visceral fat without any obvious abdominal fat

“In this meta-analysis, BMI and WC, but not WHR, were very strongly correlated with imaging-derived total and subcutaneous abdominal fat. By comparison, all three measures were moderately or strongly correlated with imaging-based visceral abdominal fat, with WC showing the greatest correlation.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10503139/

Seems decent to me.

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