Is a Belly Bad
A protruding midsection can mean many different things. It can be obesity, starvation/kwashiorkor or sarcopenia. It can mean there is a layer of fat outside, sagging organs poorly supported by weak abdominal muscles or fat surrounding the organs and stretching the muscles outward. Alternatively having the same “lean” profile at 60 as at 16 could be a sign of a decline of muscle and an increase in fat surrounding organs. You can always have a porthole put in to see what is going on, or you can check the calendar and your C-reactive protein level. If you are over fifty and your doctor has told you that your CRP, a measure of inflammation, is starting to creep up, then you are starting to suffer from age-related loss of muscle, sarcopenia. That is, you have begun to replace your muscle mass with fat, and the fat is producing inflammatory signal molecules, cytokines, that are the same as those produced by your immune system cells in response to an infection. Most of the symptoms we ass...