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When ‘Baby Fat’ is Good for Health

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Want to shed your baby fat? Wait, don’t do it just yet, for a new study has revealed that such a fat is good – as long as it is calorie-burning -”Brown Fat”.

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Brown fat burns off calories and generates heat in babies and small mammals.

Most of the body fat is white fat, which also provides insulation but stores calories. It becomes “bad” fat when an individual have too much. The “good” fat-brown fat-was considered essentially nonexistent in human adults.

The new study has found that adults have much more of this type of fat than previously believed.

“We now know that it is present and functional in adults,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Aaron Cypess, MMSc, of the Joslin Diabetes Centre in Boston.

“Three ounces of brown fat can burn several hundred calories a day,” he added.

In the new study involving 1,970 study participants, researchers measured the patches of brown adipose tissue-brown fat-in people with the help of high-tech imaging method that combines positron emission tomography and computed tomography, called PET/CT.

By evaluating biopsy tissue of what appeared to be brown fat, the authors confirmed that they were, indeed, looking at stores of brown fat.

The researchers found that brown fat was located in an area extending from the front of the neck to the chest.

Of the subjects who had detectable brown fat, about 6 percent had 3 ounces or more of the fat.

“We believe that this percentage greatly underestimates the number of adults in the population who have a large amount of brown fat,” said Cypess.

They also discovered that brown fat is most abundant in young women and least frequent in older, overweight men. In fact, women were more than twice as likely as men to have substantial amounts of brown fat.

“One theory for this is that women may have less muscle mass overall, so they need more brown fat to generate heat and keep warm,” Cypess said.

Source: The study appears in New England Journal of Medicine.

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7 Reasons to Eat More Saturated Fat

Tim Ferriss of The Four Hour Work Week has posted an exclusive excerpt from Drs. Michael and Mary Eades’ newest book, The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle.

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The two doctors note that no matter how the story spins from the denizens of the anti-fat camp, one piece of their advice remains staunchly constant: “You should sharply limit your intake of saturated fats.” But will saturated fats really increase your risk of heart disease and raise your cholesterol? In a word, no. In fact, humans need them, and here are just a few reasons why:

1) Improved cardiovascular risk factors
Saturated fat plays a key role in cardiovascular health. The addition of saturated fat to the diet reduces the levels of a substance called lipoprotein (a) that correlates strongly with risk for heart disease. Research has shown that when women diet, those eating the greatest percentage of the total fat in their diets as saturated fat, lose the most weight.

2) Stronger bones
Saturated fat is required for calcium to be effectively incorporated into bone. According to one of the foremost research experts in dietary fats and human health, Dr. Mary Enig, Ph.D., there’s a case to be made for having as much as 50 percent of the fats in your diet as saturated fats for this reason.

3) Improved liver health
Saturated fat has been shown to protect the liver from alcohol and medications, including acetaminophen and other drugs commonly used for pain and arthritis.

4) Healthy lungs
For proper function, the airspaces of the lungs have to be coated with a thin layer of lung surfactant. The fat content of lung surfactant is 100 percent saturated fatty acids. Replacement of these critical fats by other types of fat makes faulty surfactant and potentially causes breathing difficulties.

5) Healthy brain
Your brain is mainly made of fat and cholesterol. The lion’s share of the fatty acids in the brain are actually saturated. A diet that skimps on healthy saturated fats robs your brain of the raw materials it needs to function optimally.

6) Proper nerve signaling
Certain saturated fats, particularly those found in butter, lard, coconut oil, and palm oil, function directly as signaling messengers that influence metabolism, including such critical jobs as the appropriate release of insulin.

7) Strong immune system
Saturated fats found in butter and coconut oil (myristic acid and lauric acid) play key roles in immune health. Loss of sufficient saturated fatty acids in white blood cells hampers their ability to recognize and destroy foreign invaders, such as viruses, bacteria, and fungi.

Source: Four Hour Work Week September 6, 2009

Footnotes:
It is recomended to use  olive oil, but recommend against the use of canola oil, despite its widely perceived healthful reputation. In order to be fit for human consumption, rapeseed oil (which is canola oil) requires significant processing to remove its objectionable taste and smell. Processing damages the oil, creating trans fats. Also, the oil is sensitive to heat, so if used at all, it should never be used to fry foods.

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Bod Pod to Help Fight Obesity

A new Bod Pod will accurately measure fat and muscle mass with the potential to boost research on obesity and athletic performance.

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The space capsule-like pod is part of a new suite of high-tech equipment at the Massey University‘s new Human Nutrition Research Centre in Albany, including a bone density scanner and clinical lab.

The pod measures and tracks body fat and lean muscle mass using air displacement technology – replacing the tape measure and callipers or water displacement tanks previously used in research.

Welma Stonehouse, associate professor at Massey, said the Bod Pod is a highly useful analytical tool for research related to obesity, as well as for elite athletes who need to closely monitor muscle and fat ratios.

“The Bod Pod gives a very accurate reading for body composition because it measures weight and volume,” she said.

“Because fat weighs less than muscle, it can be difficult to gain a precise estimate of how much fat an individual is made of and this can lead to false interpretations of what it means to be overweight,” she said.

Sources: The Times Of India

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Weight-loss Remedies Puzzles US

WASHINGTON: When it comes to losing weight, US adults are bombarded with weight-loss claims and promises. This chaos, according to a new survey, makes individuals increasingly confused about what to believe in a bid to shed the flab.

As per a survey of 2,058 adults, conducted in late November by Harris Interactive on behalf of GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare, it was found that people were confused about what to believe in context of the claims made in regard to appetite suppressants, herbal products and dietary supplements.

Such dietary products are not required by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to submit safety or efficacy studies, or to include warnings about potential side effects on their labels.

However, the survey revealed that 3 in 5 Americans think that these products are at least somewhat effective.

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One-third wrongly believes that the products are approved for safety and effectiveness by the FDA before being sold to the public.

The interactive survey showed that two in five assumed that the government requires warnings about potential side effects on the labels of these products.

In fact, the analysis showed that about 18 million adults who want to lose weight in the coming time would rely on products that have not been reviewed and approved by the FDA before being sold to the public.

Rebecca Reeves, DrPH, RD, a GSK consultant who is past president of the American Dietetic Association and managing director of the Behavioural Medicine Research Centre at Baylor College of Medicine, said: “Weight-loss supplements claim to deliver extraordinary results with less effort than more traditional behavioural changes, such as diet and exercise.”

“However, there is scarce scientific data available to validate these product claims, which is unfortunate for the 66 percent or so of American adults who are overweight and obese,” she added.

Steven Burton, vice president, weight control, for GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare said: “Millions of overweight and obese Americans are incredibly frustrated with their efforts to lose weight, and unrealistic expectations and false hope feed that frustration.

Sources: The Times Of India

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Exercising After Big Meal

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It may help in fighting fat.

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Scientists have revealed that exercising right after eating a meal high in fat content may help people keep in shape. Max Lafontan and his team examined how fat breaks down in both lean and obese individuals who exercised after either fasting or eating a high-fat diet. They found that when either a lean person or an obese individual exercises after having a meal of high fat content, their fats break down and get oxidised in the skeletal muscle, which makes them healthier.

Work that meal out

The researchers observed that fats break down both in lean and obese individuals, after eating a high-fat diet. Whereas, under fasting conditions, the breakdown was more prominent in the lean subjects, but the high fat meal improved lipolysis, a process in which fat is broken down inside fat cells to generate energy, in the obese subjects.

For the first time, these results show how stimulation of the breakdown of fats occurs after having a high fat diet and exercise. They may also help design ways to reduce excessive fat in the body. After the process of lipolysis, the resulting fatty acids get released into the bloodstream and are carried to tissues that require energy. In obese individuals, accumulation of fat is too much, compromising lipolysis, but how this happens are still not well understood. Also, such individuals show altered responsiveness to the stress hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine in their subcutaneous fat.

The scientists also studied the effects on cultured fat cells by long-chain fatty acids (LCFAs). They observed that LCFAs cause an increase in lipolysis when induced by one of the hormones known to stimulate lipolysis, epinephrine. The researchers concluded that by showing the affects of a high fat diet and LCFAs on hormone-induced lipolysis in fat cells, the study lays the foundation for further research on the role played by various fatty acids on the metabolism of muscle and blood vessel cells.

Source:The Times Of India

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