Risks From Obesity Same After Liposuction

Diet and Exercise Needed to Cut Obesity-Related Risks

Liposuction may help you shrink your girth, but not the health-related risks of obesity such as heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. To improve your health you need to drop pounds the old-fashioned way -- reducing calories with diet and exercise, new research shows.

After removing excess belly fat with liposuction in 15 obese women, researchers found that the sudden weight loss offered no improvements in health-related risk factors associated with obesity, such as insulin sensitivity, high cholesterol and other blood fats, and high blood pressure.

"We were a little surprised because we removed a lot of fat -- an average of 22 pounds in each patient," study researcher Samuel Klein, MD, tells WebMD. "That translated to about 20% of the person's total body fat content."

Still, the fat removed produced no improvement in any of the risk factors associated with obesity -- those which boost risk of heart disease and diabetes, says Klein, the Danforth Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Science at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Read more...