Dr. Mary Claire Haver

Now, this is the fat not under the skin.

This is the fat that is inside of our abdomen that wraps around our internal organs.

Also, it could be leading to high triglycerides, a lower HDL, that's the good cholesterol, and elevated fasting glucose and increasing insulin resistance.

Those two go together and high blood pressure.

This happens due to estrogen loss and not because you're letting yourself go, okay?

So specifically, when we talk about what's happening with the increasing intra-abdominal fat, there's several kind of factors.

If you think of a traffic circle, right, and there's several entries into this circle that's spinning into a woman getting more and more visceral fat or abdominal fat.

One, your insulin resistance is getting worse.

So your ability to take in a glucose load, so eat a sandwich, eat a salad, eat whatever that has glucose, eat a cookie, and how much insulin it takes to drive that blood glucose into the cells.

So when you become more insulin resistant, it takes more and more insulin levels, okay?

Higher insulin levels are linked to more inflammation and more visceral fat, so the

higher your insulin levels are, really after you eat, so when you don't see those insulin levels decline, you don't see blood sugar going back as quickly as it used to, back to a normal level after a glucose load, we are seeing increasing levels of inflammation and more and more fat being driven to the intra-abdominal cavity.

Once that fat gets to the intra-abdominal cavity, it kind of acts on its own.

Subcutaneous fat doesn't produce as many inflammatory cytokines.

These are inflammatory chemical messengers that can go and inflame other parts of your body, your brain, your gut, your joints.

But the intra-abdominal fat does do that.

And that is new for many women.

So when we look at the data,

They did scans looking at premenopausal women and then perimenopausal women and postmenopausal women.

And they measured with either a DEXA scan or an MRI how much visceral fat they had, how much intra-abdominal fat.