No, unless it is supplemented with a balanced diet. According to a new study by the University of the Basque Country (UPV), the abdominal fat of adolescents is related to the percentage of fat they eat in the diet, regardless of the amount of physical exercise they do.
” Until now it was thought that even with an unbalanced diet, if you did a lot of physical exercise you compensated in some way, ” explains Idoia Labayen, principal investigator of the study published in the journal Clinical Nutrition to the scientific news agency SINC. However, as the scientist herself points out, “in this study, we have verified that this is not the case.”
To reach this conclusion, the researchers analyzed the abdominal fat of 224 adolescents using dual X-ray absorptiometry as well as physical activity and dietary habits. Analyzing the data, they found that high-fat diets, even when the total caloric intake was not higher, increased the risk of obesity.
Thus, as Labayen herself points out, PhD in Biology and Professor of Nutrition and Bromatology at the Faculty of Pharmacy of the UPV “ despite the fact that normally physical activity is a prevention factor, in this particular case, it does not achieve counteract it . These results point to the fat content of the diet as a key risk factor for abdominal adiposity in adolescents and independent of physical activity ”.
The accumulation of fat in the abdomen is the most detrimental to health since it increases the risk of suffering from cardiovascular problems, high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus, hypercholesterolemia, and so on.
