WAIST-HIP RATIO GAUGES FAT RISK

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, January 28, 1993                   TAG: 9301280013
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHICAGO                                LENGTH: Short
WAIST-HIP RATIO GAUGES FAT RISK
All you bulge battlers, abandon your devotion to height and weight charts.
If you really want to know how risky it is to carry extra pounds, compare the circumference of your waist to that of your hips, a study suggests.
Waist-hip ratios were better signs to predict five-year survival among 41,837 Iowa women ages 50 to 69 than a commonly used height-weight calculation, the authors say.
They found the bigger the waist in comparison with the hips, the higher the risk of death, regardless of the weight of the individuals, who ranged from about 10 percent underweight to about 40 percent overweight.
The authors cautioned that their data shouldn't be used to discount the harm of being fat, and said height-weight ratios remain an important predictor of disease.
"We recommend that waist-hip ratios be measured along with weight and height as part of routine surveillance and monitoring of risk status in medical practice," the researchers said in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB