visceral fat is the worst type of fat it's the fat that sits around your internal organs and Beyond just contributing to a beard gut it's particularly pro-inflammatory and strongly linked to poor metabolic health and poor cardiovascular health if there's a type of body fat that you want to minimize it's visceral fat and while there's not really a way to spot reduce different deposits of subcutaneous fat the fat under your skin like can't just zap your love handles or your muffin top you can elcer visceral fat because visceral fat is different tissue than subcutaneous fat just
like muscle is different than atos tissue or fat basically it stands for reason that you can alter the metabolic conditions of your body such that visceral fat becomes more malleable sensitive to fat loss and Cooperative at being burned off your body in the randomized controlled trial of I want to review with you in this video demonstrates just that and it suggests particular interesting foods that could burn stubborn visceral fat off your body including a common drink and one bizarre space vegetable yes I did say space vegetable I'll explain that in a moment now this was
an 18mon long randomized control trial in people with obesity that compared three different diets one healthy eating guidelines diet and two different low carbohydrate Mediterranean diets and both low carbohydrate Mediterranean diets included about 80 g of carbs for the majority of the trial and were designed to also be isocaloric both were geared towards more unsaturated fat and included 1 o of walnuts per day but one of the lowcarb Mediterranean diets was differentiated from the other by the addition of 3 to four cups of green tea per day plus supplementation with something called wolfia globosa duckweed
also called manai this particular low carb diet with the green tea in the duckweed was called the green Med diet now on wolfia globosa this is a really interesting vegetable that I never heard of before it's the smallest known flowering plant it's relatively high in protein it's actually a good source of B12 which is unusual for plants and it's being studied for space agriculture as a protein Source that's why I'm calling it a space vegetable now the green tea and duct Meed were added to provide an additional 800 mg per day of particular polyphenolic compounds
the relevance of which I'll explain after I reveal the results now both low carb Mediterranean diets did outperform the healthy eating control diet in the green Med diet with the green tea in the wolfia globosa generally trended to have an edge in all metrics but what was most striking was the degree to which the green Med diet lost visceral fat with over three times the visceral fat loss of the healthy eating diet and over two times the visceral fat loss of the other low carb diet with over 14% visceral fat loss now that's pretty impressive
now to explain the results again the main differentiator of this green Med diet was the green tea and the wolfia globosa duckweed or man Kai what's more even within the green Med diet group consumption of different amounts of the wolfia globosa had impressive associations in a multivariate regression model with visceral fat reduction as well as with improved triglyceride to HDL ratio which is itself a marker of metabolic Health that's linked to lower visceral fat levels now I want to get into the weeds a little bit more the duck weed you know I couldn't resist the
pun and no it's not that eating this space vegetable will make you an Asgardian alien with a six-pack like Thor in the author's words the way they explain it the difference in preferential visceral fat loss may be explained by differential sensitivity to lipolytic stimulation hormones which can be influenced by specific components of the green Med diet including compounds found in green tea or duckweed basically they're saying compounds found in these food stuffs make make visceral fat more sensitive to being lost at a high level the big idea is things in your diet your environment and
your lifestyle can impact the receptors and sensitivity on different tissues and organs throughout the body and figuring out how to fine-tune these different sensitivities across organs is how we manipulate body composition and burn more visceral fat it's a cool and really important message and overall I found this study very interesting for that reason that said I will throw out some caveats before I get to my highle takeways the interventions in the study were multimodal meaning it's not possible to dissect exactly what's going on or how the low carb diets in particular the green Med diet
caused so much visceral fat loss admittedly as I stated the green tea and wolfia globosa were what differentiated the green Med diet specifically which did have the stand out performance and if we assume that the diets were actually chronically isocaloric and mashed for carbohydrate intake at least from those two diets which they do report to be then we'd be led to believe that the green tea and the wolfia globosa duckweed did have a Bonafide metabolic benefit which is really awesome and the authors did allude to more specific mechanistic arguments in their discussion of polyphenols that
circulate in the blood in particular they found that high levels of the polyphenols hiic acid and urolithin a were also associated with visceral fat loss so perhaps these circulating compounds were the agents sensitizing visceral fat to being burned off the body indeed hippuric acid is a known marker of metabolic health and urolithin a is already known as an anti-obesity agent that can increase energy expenditure in part by increasing thermogenesis and the Browning of atopos tissue turning white fat into more beige or brown fat so you expend more energy more heat at rest but it gets
more complicated too because while these compounds can be found in some foods they're largely microbiom produced metabolites so urolithin a is made by gut microbes from precursors called elijia tannins which in fact is found in green tea wolfy globosa and walnuts and thec acid is a glycine derivative of benzoic acid and is also made by gut bacteria and is associated with more microbiome diversity thus the generation of these compounds will depend at least in part on Direct dietary inputs of their precursors their building blocks but also on the hosts your my individual microbiome compositions which
interact with your overall dietary pattern in overall metabolic health so it's a little bit of a chicken and an egg problem hopefully that makes sense or very simply put and this is a broad truth it's not just about the individual inputs into your body but how they interact with you you the host and your microbiome all that said based on these data I do think it's reasonable to conclude that upping your green tea intake possibly daily and multiple times a day and possibly including some wolfia globosa duckweed if you have interest in Access could be
a decent idea if you struggle with excess visceral fat it's certainly not required but it could provide you an edge as for me and what I'm going to be doing and my highlevel overall suggestions given the known benefits of urolith and a and the fact that I like tea at Baseline I might be skewing towards more loose leaf green teas with higher elianin contents as a precursor to your althan green tea also contains huric acid so you get both compounds and it's compatible green tea is with most dietary restrictions I also like walnuts peans and
macadamia nuts which are also sources of Elijah cannin so I may be eating more of those nuts as well and in particularly the raw nut form when it comes to walnuts and pecans because they have more fragile poly unsaturated fat and for those who liking can consume berries blueberries raspberries and blackberries contain elit tanins the precursor to euroian a as well as huric acid in fact this may be one of the mechanisms by which wild blueberries have acquired their health Halo and dairy especially fermented dairy contains huric acid and or its precursor too and may
otherwise help improve overall gut health and support microbiome diversity which is linked to higher hypc acid levels anyway with all that I hope you found this interesting I certainly found this randomized control trial interesting and stay curious and I'll see you around for the next one [Music]
