Inflammation halts fat-burning
sciencebulletin.org
sciencebulletin.org
I have been reading the articles in this blog: http://hypothermics.com/. It is an excellent blog that chronicles many of the findings and the author performs a lot of these tests on himself.
These hypothetical cold fat burning technqiues, that I've seen, suggest inducing very mild hypothermia (shivering). That only happens rarely in the north.
Are you certain of that? It gets really cold here and everyone wears jeans. Only children wear winter pants casually. Sometime the air itself is cold enough to get you shivering.
The only time I see people correctly dressed against the cold is when they do winter sports or go hiking in the woods.
You seem to have never visited warm and cold climates...
The question though is can this impact abdominal fat or not.
Even if they used to be "ex scientists" themselves (lots of people that oversell some cure without verification usually are -- Heck, Linus Pauling had 2 Nobels).
Of course, that's no magic bullet: I've probably put on something like 20lb in that timeframe. I definitely need to get more exercise and eat better.
I'm only a moderate caver, so the longest I've been exposed to cold in that context is something like 16hrs straight, or maybe 32hrs total in a 3-4 day period; most of my exposure caving is much less than that, more like a few hours at a time spaced apart by at least a week.
The problem with such blogs is that there's one for all kinds of kooky theories. The hypothermics, the epsom-salters, the music-therapies, the low-carbers, the paleos, the whatevers...
Some theories might turn out validated by scientific research with control groups and everything, but it's hardly worth it trusting such sources until that happens.
But THE low-carb dies tons of people follow (from specific books, websites, etc.) are just fad diets based on kooky theories that selectively pick partial scientific results, add some cargo cult and personal opinion (e.g. from the late Atkins) as opposed to peer reviewed and agreed upon medical consensus, and promote it as the ultimate solution to weight loss.
Many promoters of dietary schemes would have us believe that a special substance or combination of foods will automatically result in weight reduction. That's simply not true. To lose weight, you must eat less, or exercise more, or do both.
http://www.quackwatch.com/06ResearchProjects/lcd.html
(I follow a low carb diet myself, in the sense of avoiding sugar and white flour etc, but not with the proper scientific adjustments and balances -- e.g. fruit are fine--, not because some late 70s doctor said so, or because some health guru promotes a specific version of it).
Take orange juice with or without pulp. Same basic caloric values, but the pulp version carries much of the sugars away.
Many of the details people focus on are second order effects, and I have yet evidence to see that calorie in minus calorie out is a bad model for estimating weight gain.
If you have evidence for the calories being missleading by more than 10% I'd love to see it!
It's difficult for me to find nutritional data for grass clippings; but let's take your example and compare coke to alfalfa sprouts for grass clippings:
* 100g alfalfa sprouts is ~23 calories and would occupy a volume of ~3 cups [0]
* 100g of coke is ~38 calories and occupies a volume of ~.4 cup [1,2,3]
If you wanted to eat enough alpha sprouts to be equivalent to that .4 cup of coke, you would need to eat almost 5 cups worth, ~12x more volume! I can't imagine eating 5 cups of alfalfa sprouts, but half a cup of coke is trivial to guzzle.
Relative energy density seems to limit caloric consumption far before we need to model undigested bits.
[1] http://www.coca-colaproductfacts.com/en/coca-cola-products/c...
[2] http://chemistry.elmhurst.edu/vchembook/121Adensitycoke.html
[3] http://depts.washington.edu/chem/facilserv/lecturedemo/Densi...
No, but it is kooky to suggest it as a standalone diet, complete with various invalid assumptions, outside of scientific dietary consensus.
Plus, you'd be surprised how far the "calories in/out" goes: http://www.fitmole.org/twinkie-diet/
It wouldn't surprise me to see a true connection found in a couple of years between autoimmune conditions and weight in a reciprocal way.
Don't think it'll take that long. Both seem to be connected to messed up gut flora to some extent.
--
Since you have an issue with the sample size, please point me to the nearest full-scale fecal transplant study done and I'll gladly use those results.
>in a person who was probably already eating a ton and not absorbing it much due to a massive infection.
Source? Let's not criticize others for their sources and then make unsupported drive-by claims.
edit: "article" --> "case study"
There are no full scale fecal transplant studies looking into obesity to my knowledge.
> Source? Let's not criticize others for their sources and then make unsupported drive-by claims.
You're right, but upon digging deeper into the study it's even worse: neither her, nor the person she took the fecal sample from, were obese at the time of transplant. Both became obese after the treatment. The source of the transplant was her daughter, so I can imagine a lot of environmental factors effecting both of them. It's hard to imagine the donor becoming obese because of the transplant...
The point here is there are a TON of other obvious variables to examine, and gut flora may really play a role, but there is really not substantial evidence to think that's true.
Regardless of if it is true, it doesn't change much for outcomes: you still have to eat less, you still have to workout more.
Put simply: obesity is a food addiction. There are a ton of things that go into it, like depression, the reward system etc. We aren't likely to find the solution to obesity in small dietary tweaks, or fecal transplants.
You're firmly claiming causal direction on something the current research no longer supports. Psychology may be a result of digestive biome (or at least influenced by), rather than the seminal cause as you seem to think.
Edit: none of the above is to claim causality in the other direction, but to point out that the absolute nature of the claims you are making is not necessarily borne out by the prevailing research.
--
[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/108/38/16050
[2] http://www.journalofpsychiatricresearch.com/article/S0022-39...
But the point is that there is evidence that suggests certain factors cause you to eat more, but there is not really evidence to suggest that similar people do significantly different things with similar caloric loads and that it's just a matter of tweaking biology to make people process the same caloric load differently.
The problem with this study is that it's suggesting inflammation as a cause to obesity, but we know that the only long term cause for obesity is caloric surplus. Inflammation definitionally is not causing caloric surplus (in fact it's using more calories than one otherwise would) so it doesn't seem like a useful thing to be studying, and the fat gains from it don't immediately appear to be permanent. The most important thing to study is why people eat more than they should, not necessarily what happens in the body after they eat it (though, again, I agree with your larger point that those two could be connected).
However, I am not sure there is no gain to be had from a change in digestive bacteria in terms of caloric intake, because chemical changes in the digestive process could conceivably alter the efficiency of energy extraction.
In the case study linked above, the woman who received fecal transplant and gained weight was placed on a medically supervised liquid diet and exercise program, and still kept gaining. She had never been obese prior, so it's not as likely that she had the kind of dietary habits that would predispose her to obesity. Also strange: her weight gain closely tracked the weight gain experienced over the same time by the fecal donor, despite dietary and exercise differences between the two. It was enough of an effect that the researchers who presented the case study have since ensured they only use fecal donations from healthy-weight donors.
That all being said, I do think you're right that psychology of obesity is a very important aspect to consider, especially that of food addiction. I hope this is solved in our lifetimes, because it will be interesting to discover just how much gut influences brain and vice versa.
> However, I am not sure there is no gain to be had from a change in digestive bacteria in terms of caloric intake, because chemical changes in the digestive process could conceivably alter the efficiency of energy extraction.
The reason I react negatively so strongly to stuff like this is that I fear it overcomplicates an issue that is relatively simple. It gives people an idea that there is probably something really out of their control that's causing them to gain weight. We can argue about the specifics, but at the end of the day for the vast majority of people it is within their control, and it certainly isn't within anyone else's control so...
> was placed on a medically supervised liquid diet and exercise program, and still kept gaining
> She had never been obese prior
> Also strange: her weight gain closely tracked the weight gain experienced over the same time by the fecal donor, despite dietary and exercise differences between the two
> It was enough of an effect that the researchers who presented the case study have since ensured they only use fecal donations from healthy-weight donors.
There is enough wacky shit going on in this study that it warrants taking it with a heavy grain of salt. I'd argue the results give compelling evidence that the fecal transplant was not in fact related to the weight gain at all, and it seems odd that the conclusion taken was to stop taking fecal transplants from obese people when a sample from a non-obese (at the time) person might've caused someone to become obese.
All of this stuff would be interesting to study more, but without further science really doesn't mean a lot.
> That all being said, I do think you're right that psychology of obesity is a very important aspect to consider, especially that of food addiction. I hope this is solved in our lifetimes, because it will be interesting to discover just how much gut influences brain and vice versa.
Definitely. Meditation (among other things) seems to have had a significant positive impact on my digestive system, so I am certainly super interested in this connection.
I totally get this. But to me, even if you accept completely that your digestive microbial environment can change how you lose/gain weight, that doesn't take it out of your control - after all, that particular bacterial milieu is a direct result of what the individual is putting into their body. There have been tons of studies already about this particular area, that digestive choices have a direct impact on digestive biome.
I do think it makes it more complicated, but I think obesity really is that complicated - our choices have effects we don't yet understand, and some of that may have to do with being poor stewards of our gut bacteria.
> Meditation (among other things) seems to have had a significant positive impact on my digestive system
Same, as well as other areas of my life. It's why the mind/body feedback loop fascinates me so much!
Great chat, thanks much. Have a good 2017!
Sure there is. They're called 18 year olds. Sadly the effect fades at round 25.
would love a link if you have one handy. it seems impossible?
(edit: note that I'm responding to the 'impossible' comment.)
As an example in the other direction. I gained significant weight after getting a foot of my intestines removed while eating the same diet. In this case it was a very good thing as calories out balanced due to incomplete digestion.
PS: Albumin levels are not something you generally hear about, but it's very bad when they get low.
Tldr: It has to do with resting metabolism, which determines how many calories a person burns when at rest. When the show began, the contestants, though hugely overweight, had normal metabolisms for their size, meaning they were burning a normal number of calories for people of their weight. When it ended, their metabolisms had slowed radically and their bodies were not burning enough calories to maintain their thinner sizes.
First article about the study: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-we...
Step 2: Lose a bunch of weight
Step 3: Go off diet
Step 4: Regain a bunch of weight.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but I don't think there's a lot going on here that doesn't make sense. None of the contestants were particularly thin at the end of the study. Danny Cahill still weighed 191, which is actually pretty significantly overweight for someone not carrying a lot of muscle mass, which he wouldn't be at the end of a 7 month crash diet. If you get your body very very good at using its fat stores you will lower your BMR. The data doesn't suggest this is permanent or significantly impacted Danny's weight gain, the data suggests that Danny Cahill did not stick to the diet.
The Biggest Loser is frequently held up as the gold standard for how not to do things. The weight change is too fast, there is absolutely no support after its over and they frequently optimize for cardio and fat burning over muscle building, which in the short term is effective but in the long term contributes to lowering BMR and making the weight hard to keep off.
But ultimately you have to consider that Danny Cahill was still pretty unhealthy at the end of the show. None of this is starvation mode, in which major parts of your life are hugely effected (ie: you would not have the energy to leave the house).
> What shocked the researchers was what happened next: As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover. They became even slower, and the pounds kept piling on. It was as if their bodies were intensifying their effort to pull the contestants back to their original weight.
> Mr. Cahill was one of the worst off. As he regained more than 100 pounds, his metabolism slowed so much that, just to maintain his current weight of 295 pounds, he now has to eat 800 calories a day less than a typical man his size. Anything more turns to fat.
That does suggest there's something more than just "calories in < calories burned" - that our bodies are willing to adapt to keep metabolic rates low.
It does not suggest there's something more complicated than calories in < calories burned, it suggests there's something that is causing him to burn fewer calories. My explanation is that Cahill had an inactive lifestyle, poor body composition and was overweight, even after the massive cut. On top of this, no one is claiming he stuck to the diet, so it makes sense he regained the weight.
I'm not disputing that your metabolism can down regulate. I am absolutely disputing that it's a mystery and unfixable. For Cahill he needed to stay on the diet longer, and he needed to build muscle mass.
The little contributions don't matter. If you don't consume enough calories, you will not increase body fat and tissue mass. Full stop.
You can retain fluid because of certain conditions that you have (I lost 30 pounds in one hour! Ask me how) but you will not be increasing fatty body mass.
What? If you eat the amount of calories that you are expending every day, you'll operate just fine. That's the way your body was designed to work.
As long as your caloric intake sort of averages out to your calorie expenditure, you're fine. You don't have to balance every minute and every hour.
We're designed to operate at a caloric deficit for hours, if not days at a time. We obviously don't spend all of our time sleeping.
Perhaps what you are explaining is how it works with people who have an efficient/non-defective metabolic system. But hey, those people are not overweight.
Citation? Are you saying that some people are unable to turn fat into glycogen? Unless you're undergoing ketosis, or have a vanishingly rare metabolic disorder, that's just not true.
> Perhaps what you are explaining is how it works with people who have an efficient/non-defective metabolic system. But hey, those people are not overweight.
Most overweight people have efficient/non-defective metabolic systems, as evinced by the increase in obesity rates in the developed world over the past fifty years.
I've since gotten to the point where I can eat one meal a day most days if I want, but hunger headaches are a thing. (I'd still expect to get them if I were to do a multiday fast.)
That means that they're retaining water. That does not mean that they're accumulating fat stores, which is thermodynamically impossible.
As someone with body fat predominantly in the torso I would love to benefit from this research.
"While hardly any inflammation occurred in the subcutaneous fat of obese mice and cGMP signaling was largely intact, things were very different for the deeper-lying abdominal fat: through the significant weight increase, inflammation had spread and the fat-burning turbocharger cGMP largely came to a standstill."
isn't Sildenafil Viagra??
Ive had pretty good success with Keto. Lost weight, have good energy. Check out the keto reddit if you want to try it out. Great resource.
1. Rats metabolisms are very different from primate and specifically human metabolisms
2. Even if they are the same, we already know that eating a caloric surplus contributes to inflammation, so it's difficult to disambiguate the effects of eating keto vs. the effects of eat fewer calories (which people on keto tend to do).
Nothing against keto, if it allows you to comply to eating the right amount of food that's great, but controlling for calories there isn't a ton of evidence in its efficacy over carbohydrate inclusive diets.
If the (surprisingly large amount of) anecdotal evidence on /r/keto and similar messageboards is anything to go on, keto is very effective for losing a large amount of weight, possibly the best dietary strategy. But I don't think anyone really knows why.
Are there any more good ways to treat inflammation that would be a good supplement to exercise?
[1] http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/supplement/omega3-fatty... [2] http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/herb/turmeric
It's frustrating to read all this research into the mechanism of what causes fat to be stored short term, because we already know what really causes fat to be stored long term: eating too much.
We need to be researching the reward systems associated with eating, and we need to start treating obesity as the mental health issue it is. It's a food addiction, and what we don't need to understand more deeply is how fat is stored. What we do need to understand more deeply is why people eat too much and how to get them to comply to healthier lifestyles. The answers are going to look a lot like drug addiction (ie: people are self-medicating depression, anxiety, etc. with food).
No, if you are eating within caloric balance, the fat will not be burned for energy.
> we need to start treating obesity as the mental health issue it is.
Obesity is not a "mental health issue". It's a symptom. There may (or may not) be mental health issues underlying it.
> It's a food addiction
Food addictions are a real thing, and obviously where they exist they can contribute to obesity. It's also clearly the case that obesity is not simply food addiction.
> What we do need to understand more deeply is why people eat too much
There's a lot of work that has been done on this.
> The answers are going to look a lot like drug addiction
If you mean "they are going to be very complex sets of environmental, genetic, and physical and mental health factors that combine differently in different people, and that often the most effective interventions will be more indicated by the current state than the root causes in individual history", I'd agree that it will look a lot like drug addiction. In fact, we already know that obesity is, in that respect, like drug addiction, so that's just predicting the present, not future results.
If we could somehow get them to simply eat less, the condition would go away. There are arguments to be made about the mind body connection, and I think they are real, but the issues here are not that obese people are eating the same amount of food as non-obese people and that inflammation is causing some of that energy to be stored as fat. It's ridiculous and misleading for people who are genuinely trying to change their lives to suggest that small effects like this are the cause.
Also:
> No, if you are eating within caloric balance, the fat will not be burned for energy.
Fat is constantly being stored and burned as energy even within a caloric balance. You cannot store fat longterm without at some point eating at a caloric surplus.
Sure, but (barring lean/fat changes due to exercise level), thats no net change in stored fat.
> You cannot store fat longterm without at some point eating at a caloric surplus.
Right, that's how it got stored in the first place. Once it's stored, though, you can keep the same quantity indefinitely without a surplus.
It's not so "simple"; the body fights back. Hunger kicks in overdrive, the body becomes sleepy, lethargic, you get "fog brain" (for programmers this is death).
Exercise leads to an amplification of these symptoms.
It's not so easy as to "just put down the fork" or journal your feelings. The body doesn't want to change.
And it's not like the body stops these signals after a while. I have dropped 30+ pounds, always to gain it back.
Your framing of an addiction fails, especially when the participant still has to interact with food. It fails when the self-preservation acts in spite of the intent. It's a plan of perpetual feelings of starvation and less than ideal living quality.
Gastric Bypass/Roux-en-Y appears to be the only long-term successful intervention.
Weight loss is maintained https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22865194
For about two weeks, maybe. This is all the result of low blood sugar. Your body gets better at using fat to keep blood sugar high, and these symptoms subside.
> Exercise leads to an amplification of these symptoms.
I have literally never heard anyone else claim this, and what little science there is suggests the opposite.
> It's not so easy as to "just put down the fork" or journal your feelings. The body doesn't want to change.
Right, I'm not suggesting it is easy, I'm suggesting it is simple.
> And it's not like the body stops these signals after a while. I have dropped 30+ pounds, always to gain it back.
If you are still having the symptoms of low blood sugar that lasts for a significant period of time (> 2 weeks), this is absolutely something your doctor should look into.
Regardless: the meta point here is that the body is not literally starving, it just feels like it is. Which sounds a lot like addiction: the body doesn't literally need those drugs, but brain chemistry makes it feel like it does.
The study you linked to does not seem like a glowing endorsement for gastric bypass to me.
Also, not that it matters, but you're talking to someone who has lost 35lbs more than a year ago, so I do have direct experience.
You haven't experienced increased hunger or increase fatigue/sleepiness after exercise? The Vox writeup has a link to some of the research regarding exercise for weight-loss. http://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11518804/weight-loss-exercise-m...
>The study you linked to does not seem like a glowing endorsement for gastric bypass to me.
Why is that? 71 Morbidly obese patients that maintain 50%+ loss of their excess weight for over 9 years? No other diet and/or treatment rivals that.
>Also, not that it matters, but you're talking to someone who has lost 35lbs more than a year ago, so I do have direct experience.
Talk to us in 10 years (seriously). Something always happens; the diet becomes mundane, physical and/or mental issues, stress, you have a family that wants to eat something other than eggs and salad, simply not giving a shit anymore or just general aging & slowly of metabolism.
10 years is a long time to stick to the straight and narrow and keep the diet in check. Best of luck, maybe you have the mentality of a Navy Seal and will make it but most others do not.
Temporarily increased hunger is natural. Temporarily increased fatigue is natural. What you were describing, being significantly mentally impaired over a long period of time, is not.
This article says a lot of things about exercise, some of them good some of them bad. Unfortunately it basically only takes into account cardio, which yes, is not the ideal form of exercise for losing weight. The reason is contained in the article: it helps train your body to do more with less. If that's the case, then how would we do the opposite? By training our bodies to be inefficient machines, rather than efficient ones. The best way to do that is to put on muscle mass. The best way to do that is to lift heavy things.
> Why is that? 71 Morbidly obese patients that maintain 50%+ loss of their excess weight for over 9 years? No other diet and/or treatment rivals that.
> > Some 9 % of the patients suffered from internal herniation, despite the closure of potential hernia sites
> > LRYGB was effective for diabetes control in 85.7 % of the affected patients, but, surprisingly, 27.9 % developed new-onset diabetes
> > four patients [5%] required hospitalization for hypoglycemic syndrome...two [2.5%] patients underwent reversal of their bypass for problems linked to glucose metabolism
> Talk to us in 10 years (seriously).
Get your squat up to 315, and then come talk to me about how hard it is to keep weight off. Seriously, it will make a huge difference in your life.
> Something always happens; the diet becomes mundane, physical and/or mental issues, stress, you have a family that wants to eat something other than eggs and salad, simply not giving a shit anymore or just general aging & slowly of metabolism.
All of this is in my control with the exception of slowing metabolism and while aging metabolism can account for some amount of weight gain we are absolutely not talking healthy weight -> obesity levels. I definitely don't subsist on eggs and salad. Today I had a few glasses of whole milk for breakfast, a steak burrito for lunch and a bacon cheeseburger for dinner, and I'll probably have one more square meal before passing out in a few hours. I weigh about 185lbs at 6ft. I'm lifting shit in the gym 3x a week and I rock climb a 4th day most weeks. Re: stress and mental issues, meditation and mindfulness are awesome and free, and if you can afford it I highly recommend talk therapy.
> 10 years is a long time to stick to the straight and narrow and keep the diet in check. Best of luck, maybe you have the mentality of a Navy Seal and will make it but most others do not.
I look forward to our check in :)
Your body gets better at using fat to keep blood sugar high
https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/2012/01/07/we-really-can-make...
I honestly don't know enough about it to know if this makes sense, but it seems like it is significantly more complicated than "lipids cannot turn into glucose."
The meta point is: yes you will feel like shit for a little bit on a diet, your body has to adjust. If you feel like shit longer term, you may have an actual issue a doctor can diagnose and treat.
My diet did not change a bit. I didn't feel extra hungry.
I gained a massive amount of fat and I gained it extremely fast. Three months later I was clinically obese. I then paid extra attention to my diet. Started micromanaging my calories, weighing food, gave up 99% of junk food and all alcohol.
I gained more weight.
I dropped my calories down to 1000 calories a day and started losing weight. But it was basically an uphill battle to keep that up. That's not living, you try it. I thought about food all day. If I started eating even a little more I'd gain again.
I gave up and went off the drug. My weight is going down now but it's extremely slow going. I don't know if I am capable of being my former weight.
I certainly am not not ever was addicted to food. The doctor assumed weight gain had to be caused by extra food intake. It was not.
Sure you can say "rah, rah, 99% of obesity cases aren't drug induced." That is true, but my experience shows that people can be physiologically different. Or there may be something in the environment that is triggering abnormal fat storage. Who knows? But it can't be as simple as "food addiction." Food addiction can be a cause or maybe even a symptom but it's not the be all end all. Humans are much more complicated than that.
Right now there is not reason to think obesity happens outside of a caloric surplus, and there is a fair amount of basic science that supports that view. If that view were not true, it would invalidate many things that we think are true about the physical world.
That being said, while calories-in/calories-out is basically inarguable, there are many things going on that can effect calories-out even if calories-in remain the same. Body composition is one thing. I could definitely imagine medications that are catabolic leading to decreased muscle mass and increased fat storage. But I still don't think this would account for a massive change in bodyweight, not one that would make the difference between obese and not obese.