Osteoporosis and Bone Health Information | Bone Doc Blog

We have a new DXA Machine with a great new feature.  We can do body composition with BodyLogic (by Hologic).

Traditional body composition is a skin-fold pinch or BMI.  Both are often highly misleading.  (Most professional athletes are “obese” or “morbidly obese” by BMI because they have too much muscle.)  Newer systems like bio-impedance or immersion can give fairly accurate measures of total lean and total fat.  These were a big step forward, but BodyLogic goes way beyond that.

BodyLogic separates lean into bone and muscle.  It can even give a good estimate of the volume of each muscle group.  This has made it useful in assessing athletes as they train for specific sports.  Professional teams, and a growing number of Division I NCAA teams now track their players’ progress routinely.

BodyLogic body composition is also useful to recreational athletes and members of the fitness community who want to track their muscle development and fat loss.  The biggest advantage is that it can measure metabolic health by differentiating healthy fat and unhealthy fat.

“Love handles” are sub-cutaneous white fat which is actually healthy fat when present in moderation.  We dislike them because we can see them, but they do little harm.  What we cannot see is what can really hurt us.

Visceral Adipose Tissue is unhealthy yellow fat inside the abdomen and chest.  Too much of this can lead to diabetes, hypertension, atherosclerosis and metabolic syndrome.  More about VAT and how to change it next time.

Jay Ginther, MD