Comparison of body mass index and waist circumference as predictors of cardiometabolic health in a population of young Canadian adults

BACKGROUND: This study aimed to investigate whether waist circumference (WC) or body mass index (BMI) is a better predictor of blood lipid concentrations among young men and women from different ethnocultural groups. METHODS: Participants were 1181 healthy men (n = 358) and women (n = 823) aged 20-29 years taken from the cross-sectional Toronto Nutrigenomics and Health Study. Analyses were conducted separately for men and women, and for Caucasian and East Asian ethnocultural groups. Serum triglycerides (TG) and total to HDL cholesterol ratio (TC:HDL cholesterol) were used as outcomes. Associations between the adiposity and blood lipid measures were examined using partial correlations and odds ratios derived from logistic regression models. RESULTS: WC had a stronger association with serum lipid concentrations than BMI. WC was significantly related to TG and TC:HDL cholesterol after adjusting for BMI and covariates among men and women (P ≤ 0.01). However, after adjusting for WC and covariates, BMI was not significantly associated with the two serum lipid measures. WC was a better predictor of TG and TC:HDL among all sex and ethnocultural subgroups except among East Asian women where little difference between the two measures was observed. CONCLUSIONS: WC is a stronger predictor of cardiometabolic health when compared with BMI among young adults, especially among men.