Professor Elio Riboli, from Imperial College London, said: “We were surprised to see that the size of the waist have a powerful effect on people’s health and premature death.

“There are many simple and individual characteristics that may increase a person’s risk of premature death in this measure, regardless of smoking and drinking.”

He added: “The good news is that you do not need an expensive test and wait ages for the result and evaluate this aspect of health is as simple as measuring your hip and waist size.

The reason the relationship is not entirely clear, but another researcher, Dr. Tobias Pischon, from the German Institute of Human Nutrition in Potsdam-Rehbrucke says that abdominal fat is not like other fat stores, but may influence directly to develop chronic diseases by the release of “messenger substances.

The spokesman for the British Heart Foundation welcomed the results, saying it supports previous research, finding that the risk of heart disease may be higher when fat is concentrated around the waist area.

“It is important to a variety of measures used to assess body weight and shape. Just as the BMI (Body Mass Index), waist circumference and waist-hip ratio may help provide a better assessment of health risk.

“If you tend to rally around their average weight, increasing the amount of activity and what you eat help reduce the risk of heart disease and die early.”

Several reasons motivate people suffering from morbid obesity to resort to bariatric surgery:

• An important study by Dr. Christou has shown that bariatric surgery can reduce the risk of premature death by 89% in morbidly obese patients operated on and lose enough weight, when compared to morbidly obese patients who have not been made.
• Patients who are morbidly obese have much higher rates of type 2 diabetes, hypertension and heart disease than non-obese patients. These health problems are improved or eliminated following a successful weight loss in almost 90% of patients.
• Diets usually do not work long term. Only 3 to 5% of all people trying to lose weight by this method successfully maintain their weight over five years.
• Medical experts have determined that bariatric surgery was the only permanent solution for weight loss. The NIH of the United States has in fact met in 1991 and 1996, a pannel of experts and earned a decisive consensus that bariatric surgery was the best way to lose weight in the morbidly obese, when all other methods have failed for them. That consensus has since been repeated by other experts.