Research

Hormonal

Genetic variants that increase body fat percentage (BF%) have distinct, locus-specific effects on cardiometabolic disease risk, meaning that increased adiposity does not uniformly increase disease risk and can sometimes be protective depending on the genetic mechanism.

Your body fat percentage alone is not a perfect predictor of your metabolic health. Your genetics influence how that fat affects your risk for diabetes and heart disease. Some genetic profiles that lead to higher body fat may actually be protective against certain metabolic issues, while others may increase risk. Focus on overall metabolic markers (like blood pressure, lipids, and blood sugar) rather than just body fat percentage to assess health.

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loci more strongly associated with BF% showed distinct cross-phenotype association signatures with a range of cardiometabolic traits revealing new insights in the link between adiposity and disease risk.
Yingchang Lu et al. · Nature Communications · 2016

Why this rating

Large-scale meta-analysis of up to 100,716 individuals with genome-wide significance (P<5x10^-8) and replication in multiple consortia.

Source

New loci for body fat percentage reveal link between adiposity and cardiometabolic disease risk

Yingchang Lu et al. · Nature Communications · 2016

DOI 10.1038/ncomms10495

Meta-analysis · 56 studiesCited 316×
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DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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