Transcription
There's a nutrient that not only slashes your liver fat, confirmed across several randomized control trials, but also protects your liver from becoming overwhelmed and overburdened. Now, I'm going to start implementing it in my own diet because I'm incredibly impressed with the results, and I think that you will be, too. But here's the kicker. While it helps everyone, it helps some people even more than normal. Let's get into the science, the nuances, and my personal new approach to resistant starches. And actually on that last one, I may need your help, but we'll get to it.
First, the nutrient resistant starches. There are many excellent quality placebo-controlled randomized control trials published in extremely high-profile journals like Cell Metabolism and Nature Metabolism that all point the same direction. Resistant starches are an amazing class of molecules. In fact, in more ways than what we're about to go over here, which is why I have more analyses coming out on the topic. But let's stick to the subject at hand, visceral fat and liver health.
The reality is I ran across this first study because I ran across a video by Dr. Jill Carvalo. And after doing a bit of my own digging, I uncovered even more evidence. Six studies in fact. The thing is when people maintain their nutrition but they supplement with resistant starches they do experience elimination of visceral fat that specific body fat that surrounds and infiltrates into our organs. Now visceral fat is quite harmful and having lots of it exposes us to premature death. That's about as simply as I can state it. Look for yourself. This is visceral fat. The blue line is the group supplementing with resistant starches and the reddish line is the placebo group not given any resistant starches. Now we have the before measurements and the measurements four months later. We want the lines to go down and sure enough they do for the supplementing group. In fact, the difference is an over 300% increased elimination of visceral fat compared to the placebo or in absolute terms nearly 20% more. No matter how you slice it, this one group of molecules has a great effect which is shared through other visuals. Like here, the images on the left are before and the images on the right are after. These are MRI images of body fat. The more red, the more visceral fat. Now, I don't know about you, but the right side certainly looks like it has less. A perfect illustration. The point being, across multiple studies, resistant starch supplementation dramatically slashes harmful visceral fat in our body.
Here's the thing, though. The fat around our organs is critically important to reduce. But there are other types of fat aside from the vain attempts to be Achilles that are also critical to excellent health. And they tend to go hand in hand. I'm talking about intrahypatic fat. The fat not around the organs but inside the cells themselves in this case your liver. This manifests as an abundance of lipid droplets otherwise stated as fat droplets stuck inside the liver cells. Now having too much of these lipid droplets in the liver cells leads to liver cell dysfunction. Considering that your liver is made up of liver cells that means that your liver isn't too happy with you. So when we look at the levels of these fats in our liver cells here, we're measuring the intrahypatic triglyceride content, which is a scientist's impressive term for liver fat found inside the cells. Clearly, we want that to go down. And what do you see? That's right. The blue line, the resistant starch supplemented group experienced significant reductions, about six times more liver fat eliminated compared to the placebo. And this ends up being reflected in other measures as well, like liver inflammation and liver damage markers are also reduced. This all yields a conclusion that resistant starches not only punch visceral fat in the gut, but they also have a massive effect in reducing liver fat previously stuck inside the liver. You're now beginning to understand why I'm so keen to add this to my life, and maybe you'd be interested, too. I'll get into all that soon.
But I'm also always extremely interested in understanding why this happens. Keep in mind, resistant starches are never absorbed, hence their name, resistant, like a toddler not wanting to do something. Resistant starches kick and scream. Figuratively, of course, the idea of being absorbed into the bloodstream. So, if it stays in our intestinal tract, um, exactly how is it presenting such profound benefits? Well, like other fibers, resistant starches may not be absorbed into our bloodstream, but they do interact with our microbiome, the vast population of microbes living in our large intestine. So, researchers take poop samples from people not fed resistant starches, the placebo group, and poop samples from those exposed to resistant starches, and then implant them into mice. This is a direct way to test if resistant starches are having a positive effect on liver health and visceral fat through our microbiome or something else is going on. The research indicates that resistant starches do enable their benefits through the microbiome which ultimately translates to our improved liver health.
Now that we have a focus, we can then try to triangulate the specific microbes bacteria that are creating this healthful or harmful relationship. Ultimately, it may be identified that a particular bacterium is abundant when our microbiome is not exposed to resistant starches. Now, I want to pause here because this is important as you can reflect right now and ask yourself if you eat a lot of green bananas, cooled potatoes, cooled pasta, lentils, chickpeas, and the like. If the answer is no, then you probably have some exposure to these bacterium in your gut. So, what does that mean for you? Well, check it out. We're looking at liver fat levels again with mice exposed to the bacterium while the bacteria are still alive in the middle. And when they're dead, but still present in the far right. Clearly, in both conditions, there's some increased liver fat, at least in the living scenario. So, this means that A, the bacterium is harmful to liver health, including other measures that I'm not going to show you, and B, consuming too little resistant starches, like those foods that I mentioned, may offer a disadvantage as your gut may contain this harmful bacterium. Now, I want to be more clear here. We would need more data to be certain, but this is the direction the data is pointed. In addition, while these foods that I mentioned earlier do offer some resistant starches, many of these foods are still quite low in the absolute sense. So, it would take a dedicated effort to really consume sizable amounts. At any rate, we have pretty good data that consuming resistant starches changes our microbiome for the better, likely reducing the amount of certain harmful bacteria that directly contribute to fatty liver.
But here's the thing. There's another layer to this because while most people likely benefit from resistant starch consumption, there's some people that experience even greater benefits. And we actually see that distinction here. We're looking at our trusty fat found inside of our liver cells again. And the left, the pinkish red boxes are the one group of people and the blue are another group of people. Clearly, one group experiences significant reductions in liver fat while the other experiences minimal improvements. The reason is that while both groups are exposed to resistant starches, one group is considered a low responder while another is called a high responder. This is again believed to be because of differences in the microbiome. Certain microbes almost certainly bully beneficial microbes out, thereby overpopulating with less useful microbes that don't take advantage of the consumed resistant starches.
All right, regardless of your resistant starch response status, there's profound benefits to be had from supplementation. So, let's discuss how I plan on using this information and you could consider doing something similar. Before I discuss that and ask for your help, I'll be getting into how to determine if you're a high or low responder to resistant starches and even the relationship between the amino acid veene and fatty liver and more in my full analysis, my extended video of the one that you're currently watching. It's included as a physionic insider along with an accompanying article, monthly podcasts, live sessions with me, and much more as you can see here. Now, if you're interested in full access to all my work, short summaries, and all, then check out the Physionic Insiders. It's linked in the description.
Now, I'm not great at making things taste all that appetizing, and resistant starches are generally consumed in powdered form, specifically as high amalos maze or green banana powder or potato starch, doesn't dissolve well, and heating it is a no-go. So, I'm considering adding it to some shake of some sort. If you have suggestions, I'm all ears. Now, I'll keep my eyes open in the comments. That said, the amount consistently used across studies showing remarkable effects of resistant starch is around 40 g. That's a lot. Could less also be effective? Definitely, but we don't have enough data on that. So, 40 grams is the current best target. Now, I'll be supplying some good sources as I do with all my supplements that I review in my master supplement guide, also included as an insider if you want more help. Now, it might be best considering that it can lead to gastrointestinal discomfort if you go from 0 to 40 too quickly. So, to start low, maybe five grams per day for a week and then up it to 10 grams and so on.
Now, aside from palletability, I'm excited to add this to my routine, especially considering significant other health benefits that I'll be covering in the near future. So, stay tuned for that. Speaking of which, there's other science on eliminating visceral fat and improving liver health that I've covered before. Check it out right here. Thanks for tuning in. I hope this that this was informative. And again, if you have recommendations for what to mix in with the resistance starches, then let me know in the comments. I appreciate it. See you.