Having wider hips can protect against diabetes, says study

Wed, 25 Jan 2012
A new study from Mauritius has claimed that having wider hips can help lower your chances of developing metabolic disorders such as diabetes.

The 20-year study, carried out by scientists from Australia, the UK, Sweden, Finland, Mauritius and Denmark, and the first to associate obesity and mortality in South Asians, was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. It involved data on both waist and hip circumference of nearly 8,000 Mauritians, finding that someone with big hips and a small waist was at the lowest end of the risk scale while those with small hips and a large waist were at the highest risk.

When the protective effect of hip circumference was taken into account, the team isolated the health risks of abdominal obesity as measured by the waist circumference, and are now concerned about the potential danger to health for people with this type of obesity. They argued that hip circumference is just as crucial as waist, but that when both as considered, it is obvious how dangerous obesity really is.

Co-author of the research, Adrian Cameron, from Deakin University in Australia, said "We knew that higher hip circumference was protective against metabolic diseases such as diabetes as well as death."

He added "However, we did not know that taking waist and hip circumference into account separately (as opposed to using the waist-to-hip ratio) would reveal such a powerful association between obesity and mortality."

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