Abdominal obesity is a condition that describes the accumulation of body fat in the viscera. Abdominal obesity causes an increase in the waist circumference and often a general increase in body weight. Studies show that insulin resistance and the metabolic syndrome are risk factors for abdominal obesity. Abdominal obesity may reflect an underlying metabolic condition whereby hepatic fatty acid production increases, and the resulting fatty acids accumulate in the liver and surrounding tissues as triglycerides. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is often found alongside abdominal obesity, due to both conditions being caused by an oversupply of endogenously produced fatty acids. The cause of the increased fatty acid production in the liver is likely a high intake of low quality foods including refined crystalline sugars and oxidised fats. Such foods are a cause of insulin resistance which may explain why abdominal obesity and insulin resistance often occur as symptoms of the same underlying metabolic disorder.
If low quality nutrition is the cause of the underlying metabolic dysfunction that results in abdominal obesity, it would be logical to assume that high quality diets would reverse this process. Studies that have investigated the effects of high quality diets and shown this to be the case. For example, studies suggest that traditional high quality diets such as the Mediterranean and Nordic diets are effective at preventing and reversing the disease process. In particular, traditional diets are beneficial at preventing and reversing the development of Western lifestyle diseases including abdominal obesity. For example, in one study of over 10,000 participants, researchers assessed the effects of adherence to a Mediterranean diet over a 7 year period1. This was done by assigning the subjects a score based on the Mediterraneans diet. The results of the study showed that a higher adherence to a Mediterranean diet, as measured by a higher Mediterranean diet score, was inversely associated with a reduction in the waist circumference.
However, adherence to the Mediterranean diet was not associated with a reduction in body weight. The observation that the Mediterranean diet score is associated with improvements in waist circumference but not body weight support other studies that have shown insulin sensitising effects for the diet. Interestingly the researchers reported that adherence to the Nordic diet score, a measure of the closeness of the diet to the traditional Nordic diet, was not associated with any outcome. This supports other data to show that of all the traditional diets, the Mediterranean diet is perhaps the most effects at preventing or reversing disease. The mediterranean diet has been shown consistently to improve insulin sensitivity and this may relate the high concentration of phytonutrient antioxidants within the foods. Such antioxidants may decrease the oxidative stress that is thought to contribute to metabolic dysfunction.
RdB
