Hello everyone, I hope we all enjoyed little bit of summer last week and the heat didn’t affect you too much. At my last blog we talked about how “weight” and bad fat tissue (aka dysfunctional adipose tissue or DAT) are different.
At Kleyn Healthcare, we recognise the bias “weight” causes, and this is deep rooted. Even doctors like me have been subjected to many years of training which taught me to say overweight is bad. Thankfully, we are now starting to be wiser, and we should be on a journey to improve how we look at this issue. Managing Dysfunctional Adipose Tissue (DAT) needs to be individual. As we discussed last time, it cannot just be a simple measurement of numbers. I don’t like talking about numbers when it comes to body fat but we can’t escape this so let’s get this out of the way. Body Mass Index (BMI) as we know this tells little about how much DAT is on the body. Waist size to height is a better way and it explains a bit more about where the bad fat is. Unfortunately medical world is not yet ready to completely abandon BMI because a lot of science were based on BMI in the past.
But is having bad fat all about numbers? Absolutely not! Just like you and I, reasons for having bad fat can be due to different reasons. Things like your genetics, culture, where you live and what people around you believe as well as many other things can affect your bad fat tissue. I learnt recently people with certain genetic can put weight on when they eat certain type of meat. So, before we can start talking about treatment (which I’m itching to get on to) we need to talk about what we need to check. Many guidelines now suggests talking about how it is affecting you in both physical and psychological manner as well as the usual clinical history. And most importantly, what you would like to achieve with our help. A thorough examination is recommended to check how DAT can affect your health. There is no single blood test or scans to tell us how the bad fat is affecting you bad combination of tests can help us determine your risks and we should always consider this in your assessment. Your clinician should be able to advice you on the right tests for you.
My colleagues and I at Kleyn Healthcare want to chat about treatment with you – I’ll update you again in my next blog