Belly fat is embarrassing, let’s face it. And it puts a crimp on your confidence. (Hesitant to peel your shirt of at the beach recently?)

Well, recent research has uncovered that when it comes to belly fat, vanity should be the least of your worries. Too much abdominal fat is outright dangerous to your health.

If you are a woman and your waistline is more than 35 inches around, your risk of getting heart disease goes up dramatically. If your waist is less than 35 inches, your risk of heart disease is significantly less.

If you are a man, have 40+ inches on the waist, same deal. Get your waist below 40 inches, your risk for heart disease goes down significantly.

A research paper titled “The Ratio of Waist-to-Hip Circumference, Plasma Insulin Level, and Glucose Intolerance as Independent Predictors of the HDL2 Cholesterol Level in Older Adults” published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that people with smaller waists produced higher levels of HDL cholesterol compared to those with larger waistlines.

HDL cholesterol is the healthy kind of cholesterol to have in your body. It takes LDL cholesterol (the unhealthy one) and transports it to the liver where the LDL is processed and then excreted out of the body.

So the higher the levels of HDL cholesterol in your body, the more LDL cholesterol is cleared from your bloodstream and the less it can reach high levels in your body.

When LDL cholesterol reaches high levels it gets the ball rolling in the process that leads to heart disease.

» Read more: A Smaller Waist Makes You Live Longer?

I was first exposed to itchy skin parasites and Morgellons in 1994. As I was pulling vines from pine trees in my front yard a cloud of dust floated down on me. I paid little attention to it and a little later on took a hot shower. Two or three days later while visiting my mother, my significant other and I noticed intense itching. Only after taking a near scalding bath did we find relief.

The relief was only temporary as within hours the itch returned and within a day or so it the itchy skin was accompanied by intense biting sensations. Hell had just begun as we rushed to the doctor who prescribed Elemite and after we applied it, we had relief and thought we were cured. But within about four days the hell of itching and biting returned.

We soon came to know that the itchy skin parasites infected our clothing, bedding, and home. It was a scary realization that they were everywhere and we did not know where everywhere ended. I learned from the internet that diatomaceous earth would kill everything. We noticed tiny flying insects, that we though were mites, flying about the house and assumed that they had something to do with our plight and hoped relief would be provided by using diatomaceous earth.

Soon laundering all our bedding and clothing that we wore became our daily routine along with near scalding baths two to three times a day. Every over the counter product we tried brought little relief. This resulted in more trips to the doctor. Even with bite marks, open sores, and skin rashes the doctor was perplexed.

» Read more: Morgellons and Other Itchy Skin Parasites That Doctors Don’t Know About