This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

James Greenberg, PhD
Brooklyn College Brooklyn, NY

JAMA. 1996;275(20):1545-1546.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—The article by Dr Katzel and colleagues¹ shows that a 10% dietary weight loss significantly improved coronary artery disease (CAD) risk in healthy obese men, more than aerobic exercise training. This suggests 2 questions of importance to the roughly 30% of Americans who are medium weight: are the findings of Katzel and colleagues applicable to medium-weight persons, especially those with elevated CAD risk? And what is the optimal leanness for minimizing CAD risk? Results of intervention and epidemiologic studies suggest that the answer to the first question is yes, and that optimal leanness is very lean, represented by a body mass index (BMI) of approximately 20 to 22 kg/m².

Weight loss studies in nonobese persons show that dietary, or diet and exercise weight loss significantly reduces CAD risk. Walford et al² found that a 14% weight loss after 6 months of diet and exercise . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?