It is important to understand what type of patient you are dealing with in order to proceed with the most useful strategies. When are diet and exercise enough and when are pharmacological or surgical interventions necessary?
When a person can be defined obese and when alone overweight? You may not like classifications, but in the medical field they are useful. In this case, for example, they serve to intervene in the correct way on patients, with strategies that are very different from each other depending on the case.
A premise: we talk about patients because obesity is a disease and not a weakness of character of the sufferer. an inherited diseaseeven if not from a genetic point of view, but from an environmental and family point of view.
To correctly evaluate the type of problem with weight, we start with the evaluation system
of the body mass index
(which is measured by calculating weight x height squared), which divides the results into: severely thin, underweight, normal weight, overweight, class 1 obese, class 2 obese and class 3 obese.
However, this is only a first index to take into consideration: an athlete could have, in this classification, the same indexes as an obese person.
The waist circumference measurement the second parameter, because visceral fat is an independent risk factor for early death and other chronic diseases and damage to the cardiovascular system. The values not to be exceeded should be 94 cm in men and 80 cm in women (measuring the abdominal circumference at the navel).
The third parameter the ratio of fat mass to lean mass, mapped with specific tests by specialists who measure body fat percentages and muscle mass percentages. An athlete can also weigh a lot (as was written), but have a high percentage of muscle and not be obese. Even a thin but sedentary person may not be obese, but have a belly and a high percentage of body fat, parameters that are not indicators of good health. The percentage of body fat considered acceptable is between 10% and 18% for men and between 18% and 26-28% for women.
A sedentary lifestyle causes excess kilos to become a generalized problem – explains Alessandro Giovanelli, head of INCO Irccs Galeazzi-Sant’Ambrogio – when, due to the quantity of kilos, it is localized in specific physical points, or particularly important, it becomes s source of diseasebecause the adipose tissue is able to produce pro-inflammatory substances
which make you ill (with cancer, for example) and compromise the function of many organs (as well as the psyche). The bad fat is the visceral one – the expert specified -. This fabric what is called “killer” because from there the diseases develop.
On the modalities of medical intervention, the approaches are totally different. In case of overweight one acts with diet and exercisein case of obesity integrates with drugs and psychological pathwaysin some cases even necessary the surgery.
And how should the overweight child be helped? The intervention must be on society, family and children. Society must stimulate the individual to move, while our cities are not made for this – observes Giovanelli -. Entire nations must intervene and reflect on what is happening: treating those with a problem, but above all preventAnd. The environment we live in obesogeno
: the inheritance of obesity is not genetic, but environmental and familial. And they are all parameters that adults are responsible for. Young people are too sedentary.
March 3, 2023 (change March 3, 2023 | 10:09 am)
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