About 30 percent of adults aged 40 to 64 who have a large waist size have at least two of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids and high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday, urging people to track their weight and get regular health checkups.
Adult preventive health examination data from the past five years shows that about 32 percent of the people aged 40 to 64 had metabolic syndrome, the administration said.
Tu Shih-te (杜思德), an attending physician at Chunghwa Christian Hospital’s Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism, said that metabolic syndrome is a medical term for having at least three of five medical conditions — the “three highs,” abdominal obesity and low serum high-density lipoprotein cholesterol — which can be easily detected through regular health exams.
Photo: CNA
People with metabolic syndrome are at higher risk of developing heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, diabetes, hypertensive disease and other chronic health problems, the HPA said.
People with metabolic syndrome also have an increased risk of developing liver cancer and colon cancer, Tu said.
As metabolic syndrome causes chronic inflammation in the body, inflammation that occurs in the central nervous system can increase the risk of developing cognitive impairments or dementia, he said.
Adult preventive health examination data from 2021 showed that there were more than 386,000 people aged 40 to 64 years with a large waist size, and about 30 percent of them had at least two of the “three highs,” the HPA said.
Tu said that a waist circumference of 90cm or larger in men and 80cm or larger in women is considered too big, as it indicates having too much visceral fat (fat that wraps around the organs deep within the abdominal cavity), and excessive visceral fat can promote chronic and systemic inflammation.
Taiwan Millennium Health Foundation chairman and National Health Research Institutes vice president Wayne Sheu (許惠恒) said that Nutrition and Health Survey results show that the prevalence of metabolic syndrome is about 34.6 percent, and there is an estimated 6.75 million adults with the condition in Taiwan.
Tu said that people should keep track of their waist circumference by measuring it at home, and try to maintain a healthy waist size by eating a diet low in fat, sodium and sugar, and high in fibers, as well as do at least two-and-a-half hours of moderate aerobic activity per week.
The HPA said that people should regularly get free government-funded health exams to detect abnormal conditions, and they can fill in the results from the exams into the HPA’s online chronic disease risk assessment platform (https://cdrc.hpa.gov.tw), to calculate their risk of developing five types of chronic diseases within 10 years.
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