Australian researchers have mapped out what happens behind the scenes in fat tissue during … [+]
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Intermittent fasting has been touted as THE way to lose weight by everyone from Silicon Valley bros to TikTok influencers and research has shown that it is an effective way to lose weight but is it losing the right kind of weight?
A new study, conducted in mice, found that despite all the benefits of intermittent fasting, losing that spare tire isn’t one of them.
In fact, according to this latest study it can actually make your losing your belly fat harder, which isn’t great since stomach fat is strongly linked to diseases like type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
The study, published in the journal Cell Reports, looked at what happens to different types of fat tissue during intermittent fasting in mice.
What they found was that visceral “belly” fat, which is fat tissue surrounding our organs including the stomach, and subcutaneous fat, which lies just under the skin and is associated with better metabolic health, changes how it behaves when the mice only eat every-other-day.
“While most people would think that all fat tissue is the same, in fact, the location makes a big difference,” said senior author Mark Larance from the Charles Perkins Centre and School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney.
“Our data show both visceral and subcutaneous fat undergo dramatic changes during intermittent fasting.”
Usually during fasting periods, fat tissue steps into to provide energy to the body by releasing fatty acid molecules.
But when Larance and his colleagues looked at what happens to visceral fat and subcutaneous fat, they found that it went into “preservation mode” and became resistant to realising the fatty acids.
They also noted that the stomach fat in mice adapted over time, becoming better at storing fat as energy and essentially becoming more resistant to weight loss.
“This suggests the visceral fat can adapt to repeated fasting bouts and protect its energy store,” said Larance.
“This type of adaptation may be the reason why visceral fat can be resistant to weight loss after long periods of dieting.”
Larance also said it was possible that a history of repeated fasting periods triggers a preservation signalling pathway in visceral fat.
Although, it’s unclear if diets like the 5:2 diet or other calorie restriction diets would have the same effect on visceral and subcutaneous fat.
Previous research has shown that intermittent fasting in humans might reduce belly fat.
For example, a 2014 literature review found that intermittent fasting can cause weight loss of 3-8% over 3-24 weeks and the study participants also lost 4-7% of their waist circumference but whether that was a loss of visceral fat is unclear.
Further, there isn’t any long-term data to see if the weight would keep coming off if the diet was longer than 24 weeks.
So while this latest study was conducted in mice Larance says it’s likely something similar would be observed in humans.
“Mouse physiology is similar to humans, but their metabolism is much faster, allowing us to observe changes more rapidly than in human trials, and examine tissues difficult to sample in humans,” he said.
“Now that we’ve shown ‘belly fat’ in mice is resistant to this diet, the big question will be to answer why, and how do we best tackle it?”
Future research in mice and humans could uncover the mechanisms by which this resistance occurs and also which types of diet and other interventions may be best at tackling belly fat.
This article is auto-generated by Algorithm Source: www.forbes.com
