Transcription
Inflammatory excess visceral fat is one of the most dangerous things that you can have in your body. It's a setup for type 2 diabetes. It's a setup for many different kinds of cancer, for heart disease, and even dementia.
There's a lot of research that links excess visceral fat with all these chronic diseases. So, you want to avoid excess visceral fat. Now, how do you know if you have too much? Well, to measure it, you actually need to have get a scan called a DEXA scan or a dual energy X-ray absorpteometry scan, DEXA. And this scan measures the different types of tissue in your body, your bone, your muscle, your fat. Okay? And it tells you where that tissue is located, how much of it there is. So from research has already been done, we know that your body has normal healthy fat. And of that fat, only 10% of it should be visceral fat. That's what you need to actually survive. But when you start exceeding that amount, all right, your belly is going to bulge. And when you see somebody with a beer gut, that's because a lot of that visceral fat inside the cavity of the belly has been growing, growing, growing, and it pushes out the belly from the inside out. All right? It's like pregnancy with a mound of fat. And if you can't get a DEXA scan, an easy way to assess whether you're gaining visceral fat is really check your belt size, your waist size, because when visceral fat grows, it actually expands your waist circumference. All right? That's the uh the the the length around your waist and your belt size. You're going to need bigger pants. You're going to need bigger clothes and your belt loop is going to actually get um loosened up. All right. So, if you need to expand your belt or you need bigger clothes, you're probably growing visceral fat. You don't even need to go on a scale to take a look at that.
So, step number one, if you want to lose visceral fat, do not overeat. Now, how do you do this? How do you avoid overeating? Well, I'm going to give you three practical tips. Tip number one, take smaller portions when you're putting food onto your plate, right? It's up to you. You get the food you're taking the spoon or fork on and putting on your plate. Keep about twothirds of the plate empty. All right? Lots of white space. Number two, never feel like you have to clean your plate. You know that old saying about the clean plate club and there are starving people in every part of the world. Look, quit that club. that came during World War I and then World War II as a way of actually trying to save food for the troops. Today, there's too much food. There's overabundance of food. And when you get it on your plate, okay, don't you shouldn't put it on yourself, but if somebody else puts it on for you, don't feel obliged to finish it. All right? There's a good chance if you do that, you're just going to go overeat. All right? And that will make it hard to lose visceral fat. And the third tip about not overeating is to follow the old confusion rule that's called harachi bunmi. Harachi bunmi is a Japanese saying from the confusion principle of stopping your food stop eating when you're 80% full. All right. Well, how do you do this? You say like I don't know how to do 80%. Well, if you eat slowly and you get in touch with your own body by eating slowly, your stomach will actually fill, when it gets close to that 80% mark, it's going to be releasing a hormone called leptin. It's going to go to your brain and it's going to signal to your brain, hey, slow down. We are getting full. So, this will allow you by slowing down eating and by being in touch with our body to know when your hunger has been satisfied, but you're not full. Right? Most of the time, we are kind of conditioned to eat until we're really full and then we take it a few steps extra and now we're uncomfortably full. We're stuffed. No, don't do that. Just eat slowly until your brain signals to you that, you know, we're actually done. That's about 80% full.
Eating ultrarocessed foods. This might seem like a no-brainer, right? Because ultrarocessed foods contain added sugar, unhealthy fats, artificial preservatives, and colorings and flavorings, all the things that interfere with a healthy metabolism. All right? And your and you need a healthy metabolism to burn down visceral fat. So when you have ultrarocessed foods, it damages your gut microbiome, which you need for your metabolism. And your gut microbiome also lowers inflammation. So now you're if you damage that gut microbiome, now your inflammatory levels are going to go up in your body. The other thing you should realize is that ultrarocessed foods um are really easy to overeat. Remember I told you that's the first thing you don't want to do is overeat. And that's because many ultrarocessed foods are engineered designed to make you crave eating a lot of it. It's engineered for your brain to re respond to the taste and the flavor, okay? To want to eat a lot of it. If you overindulge in those ultrarocessed foods, not only you loading up on too many extra calories, but you're also loading up on all those other harmful additives that are actually going to interfere with your body's ability to burn visceral fat.
There's a lot of clinical research around uh the benefits of coffee and burning down extra visceral fat. Um a study from the Harvard School of Public Health, for example, looked at men and women who are between the ages of 35 and 69. And these women are overweight and they had insulin resistance. But here's what this re these researchers did. They gave half of the group four cups of coffee made with robusta um robust beans, coffee beans, and they gave them four cups of coffee to drink every day for 6 months. And the other half of these uh people in the research study just got a placebo. All right? And at the end of the study, remember four cups of coffee every day for six months. coffee versus placebo. They measured their body composition. So they actually did put the people through a scanner after six months of coffee drinkers, four cups a day, shrank their body mass, meaning they shrank their weight by 4.6 pounds. They dropped four 4.6 pounds. All right, just under five pounds. And they actually shrank their visceral fat just by drinking coffee. Now, what was interesting is that the placebo group, the group that didn't get the coffee, guess what? They were just allowed to eat. I mean, everybody just ate their their normal food, the placebo group actually gained 4.4 lbs. So, the coffee drinkers lost 4.6 lbs. The placebo group gained 4.4 lbs. Now, they separated even more widely. This is due to the chlorogenic acid in the coffee, the caffeine and the cafeic acid. So drinking coffee is just one way that you can actually uh take to actually lose harmful visceral fat.
There was a study done by uh a medical school in Iran. It's the Isvahan University of Medical Sciences. They do a lot of food as medicine research and they looked at 70 women who are in a diabetes clinic with metabolic syndrome. These are women who had a little bit of extra weight, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar. That's a high big waist size. Uh this is a high lots of visceral fat. This is the cardinal signs of metabolic syndrome. Uh it again on your way to type 2 diabetes. And what they wanted to do with these women is to see what the effect of green tea is. So one group and these women were given one cup of green tea to drink three times a day. In other words, they got three cups of tea a day. That's the dose of tea times 8 weeks. Three times a day times 8 weeks, right? Uh and the only the other group, the other half only just got a placebo of warm water. And here's what they found when they actually measured the uh body weight and they measured the waist circumference. So remember tube of the body, right? You got a lot of visceral fat. It's growing inside there. It's stretching out the tube, right? That's the beer gut. All right. When you shrink visceral fat, guess what? The circumference, your waist size contracts and your tube does isn't stretched out as much, right? So, at the end of 8 weeks drinking tea three times a day, the researchers found that the tea drinkers lost 2 lbs and they had a smaller waist circumference about almost an inch, 3/4 of an inch. uh it's like almost one belt hole smaller and they measured exactly what what was being lost and it was their visceral fat was their visceral fat. They lost visceral fat by drinking tea. Now they also measured other body parameters to see if drinking tea was also helpful for um uh chronic diseases uh and and physiological function meaning normal body functions. And what they found is that the green tea drinkers also had lower blood pressure. Their systolic blood pressure, right? Blood pressure is like 120 over 70. High blood pressure is 140 over 90 or higher. The top number or the bottom number being much higher than normal. And it turns out that by uh drinking tea, the top number actually goes down. that protects you against stroke because high blood pressure increases your risk dramatically of actually um dying of a stroke. So lowering your systolic blood pressure really helpful.
Weight loss tends to attract a lot of attention which quickly becomes a populist idea like people want to believe something that might not be true. So, so I was always skeptical about apple cider vinegar and weight loss. But then the research starts to uh come out and this is where I as a myself as a scientist I have to be honest by saying you know I can assume one thing but if new data comes out that I I look at and I I critically evaluate and the data shows that something is true or untrue I've got to I've got to go with the data. So with apple cider vinegar, I was astounded to see that uh researchers in Japan had been studying a dose dependent effect of apple cider vinegar on metabolism and that's weight loss. That's actually reduction in body composition when it comes to visceral fat. That's lowering of inflammatory markers in the blood. You know, the real research that one does in food as medicine, not the woo woo stuff. Um, and what I saw was really quite remarkable. First, uh, in in one of these research studies, they gave people, uh, what they called low dose, which is one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar versus high dose, which is three tablespoons of apple cider vinegar. So, if you imagine in your kitchen taking out a bottle of apple cider vinegar and and pouring three tablespoons in it into a into a a small cup. All right? um that three tablespoons is pretty easy to actually to drink if you had to. It's a quick shot. Um uh uh well, they studied this daily over the course of a month. And what they found indeed is that people who had any apple cider vine apple cider vinegar um compared to a placebo, which is drinking water, uh that uh uh that that any apple cider vinegar would actually shrink waist circumference, which is the size of your waist. And the waist circumference reflects how much fat is in the tube of your body, right? So, and that's visceral fat inside there. So, uh, over the course of a month, apple cider vinegar drinkers had a shrinking of their waist circumference. So, and they had less body fat, uh, and their inflammatory markers also went down and they actually lost, uh, weight when you looked on a scale. That's pretty amazing to me that you can do a a study to show that this works. Now, couple of fine points. The people who had the higher dose, three tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, lost more weight, lost more body fat than the ones who had one tablespoon. And that's a dose response, which is a good sign that there's something real biologically going on. All right. Um, usually if it's sort of look, you can have different kinds of dose responses. This one was pretty convincing that something was working. uh if a little bit is good, a little bit more uh can actually have even a greater effect and and loss more fat. Um and the fact that was that the type of fat that was lost was visceral fat. That is the harmful inflammatory fat that we really want to deal with, you know, um especially by the way in Southeast Asians. That that's really the kind of the apple uh uh shape that people can become as they get older. And the apple is really where the waist size expands because you wind up actually growing more visceral fat. Visceral means guts and visceral fat is a fat that kind of grows naturally grows around the guts. But when it builds up, you expand your waist size. So you want to kind of reverse that. Apple cider vinegar actually works. Now couple of things about it. When you break it down into what is actually happening because I, you know, I always ask, does something work in people? doesn't work in people, you know, like we've cured cancer in mice all for years. Doesn't mean that it's going to work in people. But something that works in people now, it's worth going back into exploring how what's the mechanism of action, you know, like like an inquiring scientist always wants to know. So guess what? It's not the apples in apple cider vinegar. It's not the apple source. It's the vinegar. It's the acetic acid. All vinegar is made with acetic acid. In fact, acetic acid is a definition of vinegar, which is another name for vinegar. The chemist, the chemists call acetic acid, the chefs call it vinegar. All right? And vinegar uh actually works by preventing fat cells in our body. These fat cells are called adiposytes. Adipose fat site cell uh vinegar acetic acid prevents fat cells from expanding. All right? And it also impedes your body's own ability to make new fat cells. So we, you know, we all are born with fat cells. They expand. It's our fuel tank. If if you are still eating and you're building more fat, your body can make new fat cells with stem cells. So now you actually create more fuel tanks and you can grow your fat mass. Acetic acid prevents the first fat masses from from blowing up like expanding and it prevents the new ones from growing as well. We think that that's really the one of the primary mechanisms of action acetic acid or vinegar. What does that mean? That means that apple cider vinegar is good. That's been shown in clinical studies, but it means that other vinegars are also good. white vinegar, red wine vinegar, uh there's all kinds of vinegar you can actually make um with a variety of different uh uh uh fruits and vegetables, frankly, that can all be fermented to create that acetic acid. Um if you take a look at uh countries in Asia, they have black vinegar, fermented vinegars. There's a whole, you know, go into any store that carries a variety of vinegars and you will be blown away by the uh by the diversity of how you create vinegar. My health tip, anybody who is interested in exploring this for themselves is if you are whatever the vinegar is, please pick up the bottle and read the label for the ingredients because you want to make sure that it really is indeed true apple cider vinegar or red wine vinegar and it doesn't have other ingredients added to it because many times well-intentioned uh companies will want to doctor up or put additives into a vinegar in order to make it more appealing. Great example is salad dressing. Salad dressing is made with vinegar and oil, but in a salad dressing, they'll put all kinds of things in there to make that product seem more appealing. And those additives can actually be detrimental to your health and detrimental to your metabolism.
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