Does kimchi reduce beer bellies?

Introduction

On January 30th, 2024, I spotted a story in many news outlets about kimchi. One headline was “Eating kimchi three times a day can reduce the size of your beer belly, according to major study of 115,000 people” (Ref 2). I located the study behind the headlines. It was called “Association between kimchi consumption and obesity based on BMI and abdominal obesity in Korean adults: a cross-sectional analysis of the Health Examinees study” and it was by Jung et al (Ref 3).

The article reported ““Kimchi is traditionally consumed as a side dish in Korea and manufactured by salting and fermenting vegetables with various flavouring and seasoning ingredients, including onion, garlic, red pepper powder, salted shrimp and fish sauce.” The article further explained that baechu kimchi is cabbage kimchi and kkakdugi is radish kimchi.

I tweeted my prima facie observations (Ref 4).

We come to the first issue: