Fish oil turns fat-storage cells into fat-burning cells.
Adam Rifkin stashed this in Science!
Stashed in: Recommended Products!, Best PandaWhale Posts, Awesome, Fat!, food, Nutrition!, Heart, Costco, Nutrition, Supplements, Trader Joe's, Schizophrenia, Interesting Tidbits, Weight Loss
*Frantically guzzles fish oil*
Fish oil has long been known to confer a wide range of health benefits, including boosting the cardiovascular system and potentially even treating the effects of schizophrenia. Now a new study from Japan says it could also help people trying to lose weight.
Researchers from Kyoto University found that mice fed on fatty food and fish oil gained considerably less weight and fat than mice that consumed fatty food alone. The findings suggest that fish oil is able to transform fat-storage cells into fat-burning cells – and if the same process occurs in humans, fish oil could help us reduce weight gain, especially as we age, when our fat-burning cells are in lesser supply.
While we might think of our fat tissue as primarily a fat storage system, this isn't always so. White fat cells store fat, but brown fat cells metabolise fat to maintain a stable body temperature. Our bodies metabolise fat more easily when we're young, as we have a greater amount of brown fat cells in youth, but we start to lose them in maturity.
Scientists have also discovered a third type of fat cell – beige fat cells – which function much like brown fat cells in mice and people. Also like brown fat cells, the beige cells diminish in number as we get older, making it harder for our bodies to burn fat. This is where fish oil could come into play.
"We knew from previous research that fish oil has tremendous health benefits, including the prevention of fat accumulation," said food scientist Teruo Kawada from Kyoto University. "We tested whether fish oil and an increase in beige cells could be related."
To examine the links, the researchers fed one group of mice fatty food, and another group fatty food with fish oil additives. The results, published in Scientific Reports, reveal how the animals that consumed the food with fish oil gained less 5 to 10 percent less weight and 15 to 25 percent less fat – a significant reduction in the circumstances.
But why does this happen? The researchers say that fish oil activates receptors in the digestive tract, which fires up the sympathetic nervous system and induces storage cells to metabolise fat. In other words, the fish oil causes white cells to transform into beige cells, effectively turning fat-storage tissue into fat-metabolising tissue and leading to increased energy expenditure at the expense of weight gain and fat accumulation. This is good to know.
It's too soon to say whether these findings also apply to humans, but further studies may show just that, which the researchers believe could contribute to an effective treatment for obesity.
"People have long said that food from Japan and the Mediterranean contribute to longevity, but why these cuisines are beneficial was up for debate," said Kawada. "Now we have better insight into why that may be."
Read these next:
More: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep18013
Reddit comment:
Tldr; fish oil acts as a thermogenic fat burner. It activates your 'brown fat cells' which use up fat to produce heat.
This actually sounds reasonably likely to work in humans as well. Some brown adipose tissue is retained in adults, and combining fish oil with cardio in a low temperature environment (eg. swimming in coolish water) would probably produce a significant result. Shame my body is not willing to tolerate 1g+ doses.
Examine is my go-to source for info on supplements - here's the article on fish oil: http://examine.com/supplements/Fish+Oil/ I don't think it incorporates that new study as of yet, but it's pretty good. Bodybuilders have been using fish oil for body-comp purposes for a long time now. E.g., https://www.t-nation.com/supplements/fish-oil-and-fat-loss
That's good to know.
Seems like the downsides (mercury) are made up for by the upsides (cardiovascular boost, fat loss).
From the Reddit comments, fish oil rankings: https://labdoor.com/rankings/fish-oil
Trader Joe's gets a B, Costco gets a C, and all 52 supplements had measurable Mercury.
D'oh!
I usually take 4 capsules per day, which is 4 g of fish oil (2.16 g EPA and 1.44 g DHA) - for price and quality, I really like Citadel (which I buy online): http://www.citadelnutrition.com/store/supplements/fishoil They don't make too much, but what they do make is excellent.
Thank you for the recommendation, CJ!
10:00 PM Dec 20 2015