Name: How Do Sumo Wrestlers Avoid Obesity-Related Diseases?
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NOVA

Experts weigh in on the relationship between food and exercise—turns out it's much more complex than it seems.
Remembering sumo champion Byambajav Ulambayar, who died in February 2020.

It has to do with where the fat is distributed in their bodies.

How Do Sumo Wrestlers Avoid Obesity-Related Diseases?

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Experts weigh in on the relationship between food and exercise—turns out it's much more complex than it seems.Remembering sumo champion Byambajav Ulambayar, who died in February 2020.

It has to do with where the fat is distributed in their bodies.

Body & Brain

How Do Sumo Wrestlers Avoid Obesity-Related Diseases?Published: April 9, 2020Onscreen: The heavier you are in sumo, the harder it is to take you down. But how do sumo wrestlers avoid diseases normally associated with obesity?Narrator: The answer lies in where they store their fat: safely underneath their skin, instead of in the abdomen or chest, packed around internal organs.Stephen O'Rahilly: And so, if you do a scan of an active sumo wrestler or a C.T. scan or an M.R.I. scan, you’ll see all that fat. But it’s on the outside, it’s on the buttocks and thighs, it’s on the outside of the abdomen.Carolyn Apovian: So even though they have body fat, they don’t contain a lot of fat in those deleterious places such as the liver, around the heart, around the pancreas and even around the kidneys. So, they’re metabolically healthy.Narrator: And the key reason is that sumo wrestlers exercise rigorously, up to seven hours a day.Sylvia Tara: When we exercise, our fat releases a hormone called adiponectin, and adiponectin actually helps guide fats in the blood into safe deposits of fat, so they’ll guide it into subcutaneous fat, right under the skin.Interestingly, when sumo wrestlers come off of their exercise regime, they get metabolically unhealthy very quickly.Narrator: To maintain a stable weight, the number of calories you eat needs to match the number you burn. So, many assume that losing weight is simply a matter of eating less and exercising more. But scientists are discovering that it’s not so simple.O'Rahilly: So, what is astonishing is the fact that we ingest more than a million calories a year. And yet we don’t oscillate between supermodel and an opera diva over the whole period of a year. We stay pretty stable.Randy Seeley: So, I think the best way to think about how weight is regulated is to think of it as a set point, right? That is, that our body is defending a very particular weight under a certain set of circumstances.Rudolph Leibel: And it’s obviously not set, because the body weight can change. What is set is what is the minimum body weight for that individual. If you drop your body weight below this threshold, the body will begin to do whatever it has to do, to prevent your dying of starvation.

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How Do Sumo Wrestlers Avoid Obesity-Related Diseases?

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Support Provided By

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