Layer 1 · Metabolic cascade
The Overflow Tank
Limited safe fat storage, visceral overflow at lower BMI.
The idea
Your body has a preferred strategy for storing excess energy: subcutaneously, just under the skin, where it is relatively harmless. South Asian biology tends to come with a smaller safe parking lot. When that lot fills, the overflow goes deeper, wrapping around organs, embedding in muscle, filling the liver. This happens at weights standard medicine calls normal, which is why the scale and the BMI chart keep reassuring people whose organs are already storing what their skin could not.
Deep dive: The Overflow Tank: On Ectopic Fat — The depot tour: liver, pancreas, muscle, heart, kidney, and vessel-wall fat.
How the evidence grades it
Every study is labeled by what it does to this concept. Counting the counterevidence is the point.
Key studies
- Differential Pathophysiological Drivers of Susceptibility to Type 2 Diabetes and Metabolic Dysfunction-Associated Steatotic Liver Disease: Ethnic Differences in Insulin Dynamics, Whole-Body Fat Metabolism, and Organ-Specific Lipid Deposition. PMID 41698854
- Trends in prevalence of type 2 diabetes, obesity, and hypertension in urban India since 2000: a systematic review and meta-analysis. PMID 42457235
- Greater Glycaemic Responses to Bodyweight Change in South Asians Than White Europeans at High Risk of Type 2 Diabetes. PMID 42225307
- Anthropometric prediction models of body composition in 3 to 24month old infants: a multicenter international study. PMID 39304751
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