Diet, afib and diabetes

[Ianc2]

How much body fat should you be carrying as a percentage of your weight?

[BobD Volunteer]

Recent trials have shown that a BMI of 25 or less can be efficacious in reducing AF burden.

[Ianc2 in reply to BobD]

I agree completely . What you eat is more important than what you do, as in you can't out run a bad diet.

[Hidden in reply to Ianc2]

funny you say that, I see an intragrative doc and he just told me that. He said he doesnt care if I dont reach my goal wt but does care that I move and put good nutrition in to my body

[Auriculaire in reply to BobD]

BMI is useless when it comes to body composition. Years ago my husband's workplace employed some health consultants to assess the health of the office workers. At the time he was playing squash 3 times a week and was muscular with very little fat and certainly no " pot". Both he and the office Marathon runner were classed as obese according to their BMI.

[S11m in reply to BobD]

Reducing my body-fat percentage has improved my health, but as I am tall, old, large-framed and muscular, my BMI is not a good indication. I am about 20% body-fat, but BMI 28!

[Ianc2]

According to the wikipedia link referred to above: In America:

in males, mean percentage body fat ranged from 22.9% at age 16–19 years to 30.9% at age 60–79 years.

In females, mean percentage body fat ranged from 32.0% at age 8–11 years to 42.4% at age 60–79 years.[2]

On the British Heart foundation site there seems to be an increasing number of people who consider themselves fit and active and of reasonable weight and are being shocked to find that their arteries are clogging up and that stents are having to be fitted The question they are asking is 'Why are the arteries clogging up'?

[Hidden]

If we eat healthily and have no problems with malabsorption, does a very low body fat percentage have a negative impact on AF, assuming a normal chem profile?

More difficult in relation to type 1 diabetes, because of complex metabolic issues at play I imagine.

[Love100cats in reply to Hidden]

An interesting comment you made. I'm obese and not diabetic not even borderline. I have h.f. My husband is lean and often slightly underweight but is insulin dependent and h.f. The difference may be diet. I'm a lover of fruit and veg. He's a lover of cheese and butter. But could it be that simple?

[Hidden in reply to Love100cats]

Type 1 diabetes does not result from being overweight or eating a high fat diet. Not all obese people have impaired glucose tolerance, the hallmark of early type2 diabetes. Some people with type 2 diabetes take insulin, usually because they are unable to lose weight.

So my answer to your question would be no. Probably. 🙂

[Ianc2 in reply to Love100cats]

So how do your sugar/ cholesterol/insulin levels compare?

[Love100cats in reply to Ianc2]

My sugar, insulin and cholesterol are low. So my h.f. is due to high b.p. and heart problems inherited and my weight due to underactive thyroid and a weight problem not an eating one( specialists words). So my very slim husband had the heart attack due to clogged up arteries which I don't have. Hard to fathom all this🙄

[Ianc2 in reply to Love100cats]

Does he eat a lot of bread and biscuits with his cheese and butter?

[Love100cats in reply to Ianc2]

No. He has two thin slices of milk loaf for lunch or three crackerbreads which weigh nothing. At night he doesn't sleep well so raids the fridge for a piece of cheese. Dr says not to worry as he is so often underweight. He is not a well man and has health issues which can't be solved because he is so frail. He has a pacemaker with defib and the hospital expect it to start shocking him some time soon. So I don't nag him. It pleases me when he does enjoy food.

[Ianc2 in reply to Love100cats]

Thanks for coming back to me. I am trying to make sense of why arteries clog up in people who exercise, eat reasonably and are not particularly overweight. There is quite a lot of evidence around exercise levels and different types of diet, but a lot of the diet advice is conflicting and contradictory, along with some very dodgy statistics. Such is life.

[Love100cats in reply to Ianc2]

I believe we have a predisposition to certain illnesses because of inherited genes and our life style can make the outcome inevitable. This debate will go on!

[S11m in reply to Ianc2]

I think that a lot of medical problems are caused by the "low fat" panic due to decades of WHO and NHS misinformation. See the Low-Carbohydrate High-Fat forum.

[Hidden in reply to Ianc2]

Hypertension, free radicals, as in nitrites, tobacco and atmospheric pollution, and genes said to be implicated. Statins are effective anti-inflammatories in atherosclerosis.

[Ianc2 in reply to Hidden]

Agreed - but what causes inflammation in the first place?

[Hidden in reply to Ianc2]

Page 2 of this article references this.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

[Ianc2 in reply to Hidden]

Thanks for the reference.

From the report:

In a large clinical trial it was observed that serum high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP), the principle marker of underlying systemic inflammation, was a significant predictor of cardiovascular risk, even in a subgroup of women with low LDL cholesterol .

Epidemiological studies and prospective clinical trials have also shown an increased risk of cardiovascular events in patients with high levels of CRP irrespective of cardiovascular risk assessment and lipid profiles, highlighting a key role for inflammation in atherosclerotic disease.

A higher CRP level also seems to correlate with a recurrent risk of myocardial infarction, incidence of sudden death and peripheral arterial disease in patients with acute coronary syndrome .

I quote from the conclusion:-

"The current view of coronary heart disease has deeply changed ; atherosclerosis is no longer considered a simple lipid storage disorder but a systemic inflammatory disease. Inflammation is a physiological response to physical, mutagenic, infective or psychologic injury; an altered or prolonged inflammatory response may inflict serious damage upon the host."

So what will my GP say if I pop in and ask for a hs-CRP test?

[Hidden in reply to Ianc2]

If a standard CRP is normal, I guess the other and more expensive hs-CRP assay would be pointless. If the former is raised and there is evidence of vascular disease, a statin would be considered I imagine.

[Ianc2 in reply to Hidden]

I think the words 'systemic inflammatory disease' interest me..

[john-boy-92]

Percentage fat measurement on electronic scales will depend on whether they are set to normal or athletic, and I see that someone has answered with recommended percentages. I'm not sure that reducing fat level to athletic levels will reduce AF. I do up to three hours per week on a rowing machine plus a weekly walk of up to eight miles and, a regular two hour session in the winter of cutting scrub with heavy power tools. On scales set to athletic my fat content is <7% and on one admission to hospital I was declared to be "malnourished"! I still get AF during hard some rowing machine sessions though.

[Ianc2 in reply to john-boy-92]

Good old engineering principle - push it until it breaks and then back off a bit

[Ianc2]

I agree completely, but there seem to be a lot of people on the BHF site who can't work out why their arteries are clogging up despite leading healthy active lifestyles. Is the low fat high carb diet being implemented in such a way that too much sugar/starch/complex carbs is causing sticky blood, leading to arthersclorsis?

[john-boy-92]

Oh yes. In my working life I was involved with high resilience computer suites and I always tested the support kit to the short time energency rating.

[DK81]

In my view BMI is useful only for "average" people. It takes no account of how broad a person is, and how athletic (muscle mass issue). As far as body fat is concerned, maybe just looking good in the mirror is as good an indication as anything scientific.

[S11m in reply to DK81]

Lies, damned lies and statistics! re BMI, see:

medicalnewstoday.com/articl...

I had always thought that using height^2.5 would give better results - and they also think that.

Unfortunately, you cannot easily quantify common sense... and everything has to be quantified in this awful world in which we live.

[DK81 in reply to S11m]

Yes, a very good article, well presented and thorough in content. Just a technical point: I do not know where the ^2.5 comes from, although it seems a very sensible exponent.

[S11m in reply to DK81]

Height times 2^2.5 is a better approximation than height times 2 squared.

He analysed real-world height and weight data, and tried to find a formula that related height to weight.

If tall people were scaled-up versions of short people, the average two-metre tall person would be 2^3 = 8 times the weight of the average 1m person... (e.g. 15kg for 1m people and 120kg for 2m people) but tall people tend to be tall and thin, so he found that height was not proportional to the cube of height... and the square of height fitted the data better.

In 1830 they did not have computers or electronic calculators... so calculating the height-to-the-power-of-two-and-a-half would have been time-consuming. He could have created some reference tables, but using the square of the height, not the cube, was easier.

[S11m]

Yes, Hidden the NHS is remarkable in that it, in some standards (e.g. BMI), is about 100 years behind current research - remarkable for an organisation only 50 years old!

[Auriculaire]

It is hard not to denigrate a system where the goal posts are changed arbitrarily overnight . "Normal " BMI was reduced like that catapulting millions of people into the "overweight " category overnight. One suspects for the benefirt of slimming industry profits. Bit like keeping lowering desirable cholesterol levels so as to put more people on statins. All this reducing individuals to numbers and algorithms results in too much one size fits all health care .

[Auriculaire]

That does not answer my point of arbitrary changes and your analogy with speed limits is ludicrous.