HHS HealthBeat (November 17, 2009)

Exercise and deep belly fat

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Visceral fat is deep fat – inside your belly, where it grows around your vital organs. The more you have, the greater your chance of diabetes and heart disease.

But researchers say that people who lost weight and exercised to keep the weight off for a year kept the insides of their bellies skinny.

At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Gary Hunter had some people train aerobically, and others do resistance with weights:

[Gary Hunter speaks] "The people who aerobic and resistance trained and continued to do that gained back no visceral fat at all – zero."

Still others, who lost weight but didn’t exercise – or who stopped exercising – gained back about one third of their visceral fat

The study in the journal Obesity was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Learn more at hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: May 7, 2011