What Is Visceral Fat, and How Is It Measured?

Visceral fat, or visceral adipose tissue (VAT), is the fat inside your abdomen, packed around the liver, intestines, and other organs. It matters because it’s more closely tied to type 2 diabetes and heart disease than the fat just under your skin, and two people with the same weight can carry very different amounts of it.

This article is general information, not medical advice.

Why It Matters

A 2019 position statement led by Neeland and colleagues, for the International Atherosclerosis Society and the International Chair on Cardiometabolic Risk, concluded that visceral fat is an independent marker of cardiovascular and metabolic disease and death, beyond what body mass index (BMI) shows. Visceral fat is metabolically active: it’s linked to insulin resistance, high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol, and fat in the liver. Fat on the hips and thighs, by contrast, is linked to little or no added risk.

How It’s Measured

Method	What it reports	Notes
CT or MRI	Visceral fat area on one slice (cm²), or volume across the abdomen (cm³)	The reference methods. CT uses radiation; MRI doesn’t
DXA	Visceral fat mass (g) or volume, and android and gynoid fat	Estimated from a low-dose X-ray scan; often part of a body composition scan
Smart scales	A “visceral fat rating”	A maker’s own scale from impedance and equations, not a measurement of mass or area
Tape measure	Waist circumference or waist-to-height ratio	A proxy for central fat that doesn’t separate visceral fat from the fat under the skin

A review by Shuster and colleagues describes CT and MRI as the most accurate, since they image the fat directly. Area, volume, and mass are different quantities and don’t convert into each other, so compare readings only with ones taken the same way.

Android and Gynoid Fat

A DXA scan also reports fat in two regions: android (around the abdomen) and gynoid (around the hips and upper thighs). The android-to-gynoid fat ratio is higher when you carry fat centrally, which is the pattern linked to cardiometabolic risk. It includes fat under the skin of the abdomen too, so it’s a coarser view than visceral fat itself.

What Lowers It

Visceral fat responds to the same things as body fat in general, and especially to exercise. In a meta-analysis of 117 studies, Verheggen and colleagues found that both diet and exercise reduce visceral fat, but exercise tended to reduce it more for the weight lost: without any weight loss, exercise training was linked to about a 6% drop in visceral fat, and diet to almost none. That’s a reason not to judge an exercise programme by the scale alone.

Following It in Kaizora

Kaizora keeps Visceral Adipose Tissue Mass, Visceral Adipose Tissue Area, and Visceral Adipose Tissue Volume as separate metrics on the Body page, because they’re different quantities from different methods, along with DXA’s Android Fat Percentage, Gynoid Fat Percentage, and Android-to-Gynoid Fat Ratio. Log a scan’s values with Log, and record the scanner as the device, so that a later scan on another machine can be told apart. Waist-to-height ratio, from a tape, is the easy measure to follow between scans; see Why Waist-to-Height Ratio Is a Better Quick Check Than BMI.

The Short Version

• Visceral fat surrounds your organs and is more closely linked to disease than fat under the skin.
• CT and MRI measure it best; DXA estimates it; a scale’s rating is the maker’s own score.
• Exercise reduces it even when your weight doesn’t change.

Sources

• Neeland IJ et al., “Visceral and ectopic fat, atherosclerosis, and cardiometabolic disease: a position statement,” The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology 7, no. 9 (2019): 715–725. doi:10.1016/S2213-8587(19)30084-1
• Shuster A et al., “The clinical importance of visceral adiposity: a critical review of methods for visceral adipose tissue analysis,” British Journal of Radiology 85, no. 1009 (2012): 1–10. doi:10.1259/bjr/38447238
• Verheggen RJHM et al., “A systematic review and meta-analysis on the effects of exercise training versus hypocaloric diet: distinct effects on body weight and visceral adipose tissue,” Obesity Reviews 17, no. 8 (2016): 664–690. doi:10.1111/obr.12406