Transcripts

Mackie Shilstone:
If your waist measurement is 35 as a woman or 40 as a man, it's not just so much how fat you have. You're carrying it in the most dangerous place that a human being can carry it: in the waist.

Mackie Shilstone, author of the book Maximum Energy for Life, explains exactly what the relationship is between waist size and your health.

When a woman hits 35 and a man hits 40, in terms of waist measurement and inches, and carries that into their fourth decade, if they have a history of Type II diabetes or coronary vascular disease, they can see a first event of either diabetes or a heart attack within seven years. If they don't have it and they still have a 40-inch waist as a man or a 35-inch waist as a woman, they could be looking at a first event within maybe ten to fifteen years. You don't want to have a large waist measurement. There's enough scientific evidence to say that with that large waist measurement, the first thing you'll get is diabetes.

There are 18 million diabetics in the United States.

40% of that number is probably undiagnosed. Go and have a fasting blood sugar test-it's very easy. Go in the mall, give blood, they'll do a fasting blood sugar, they'll check your cholesterol. Most people don't know that they're diabetic. You can do something about it, you can change your life! You can get that energy back and when you get energy back, you can become passionate and you can accomplish anything you want to do.

There are tools to evaluate your own health at Mackie's website, which you can link to from ours, somethingyoushouldknow.net. I'm Mike Carruthers and that's "Something You Should Know."