Small waist – Good lungs?

A trim waist is usually admired, for beauty if not for health, but now there’s an even better reason to avoid putting on weight around your midriff. There’s more bad news for people who carry excess weight around their middle because having a big waist measurement is now shown to affect your lungs. The study was done at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research on 120,000 Parisians and found that factors such as whether the subjects had been or were smokers did not impact their lung function as much as having a large waistline did.

If you are wondering what ‘large’ means, they defined it as over 35 inches for women and 40 inches for men.