begin to dig: fat

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Sunday, March 20, 2016

The Cream of Fake Health Foods

https://oakhurstdairy.com/img/Products_Creams_Heavy_PT_121002.jpg

getting heavy about cream

If we see something that says we can have all the flavours of something supposedly sinful like heavy (or in the EU double) cream but with an Nth of the calories - and in fact that that product will BURN fat and suppress appetite, what wouldn’t we pay for it?

How about 20bucks for 280g (about a pint)?

Recently i saw this post on a fitness challenge site by one of the participants:

For all multiple cups a day coffee drinkers like me, I have your morning joe's new best mate!

Supresses appetite, taste delicious, and a healthier alternative to pounds of creame in your coffee!My favorite product of the week, Leaner Creamer!

"Leaner Creamer is the realization that a healthy alternative to fatty coffee creamers can exist. Leaner Creamer revolutionizes the cherished ritual of coffee drinking by adding the benefits of appetite suppression and weight-loss while you enjoy your java!"

Made with Hoodia extract, a plant native to the Kalahari Desert that tricks your brain into thinking it's full. Coconut oil easy to digest and it helps in healthy functioning of the thyroid and endocrine system. Further, it increases the body’s metabolic rate by removing stress on the pancreas, thereby burning more energy and helping obese and overweight people lose the weight. Green tea extract to increase metabolism and fat oxidation, inhibit fat cell development, and increase fat excretion!I love it, use it every day, taste great, stops me from snacking! Check it out!

Wow! and i thought a pint of whole organic cream in the US at 5.60 was expensive. THis is 19.95 . For POWDER!

"Leaner Creamer is the realization that a healthy alternative to fatty coffee creamers can exist"
Healthy? Healthier? Time for the Claims Check, Please.

First troubling bit: you won’t find the nutrient breakdown on the product site, but you can find it.
Creamer ingredients (14)Coconut Oil, Maltodextrin, Natural Flavors, Sodium Caseinate(A Milk Derivative), Mono, and, Diglycerides, Dextrose, Dipotassium Phosphate, Tricalcium Phosphate, Soy Lecithin, Silicone Dioxide.17% Proprietary Blend:Citrus Aurantium, Hoodia Gordonii Extract, Green Tea Extract.- See more at food facts:

You know, this does look remarkably like the ingredient list for flamable coffee mate or similar. IN fact about the only differences are the added supplements at the end, and the presence of some coconut oil.

Which on the health side, raises the question:

IF this is the same as regular (flammable)highly processed coffee creamer, how is it "healthier" than cream? Coconut oil (first ingredient) needs to be processed to become a powder that will dissolve like a fat when put in hot water: that's in part the role of the maltodextrin (type of sugar) and the fifth and sixth ingredients: mono and di glyserides as emulsifiers - these also make up some of the fat content.  In other words fat from the coconut oil is extracted, and some of these other fats are put in. How much coconut oil is really left?
Note also that after the little bits of fat and sugar, there's flavourings. The third ingredient is flavouring - unnamed - who knows derived from what. 

Then i looked to find the nutrient calorie info. Amazing reading 
First off, the serving size is 1teaspon (5g of a 280g bottle) like a packet of "powdered creamer" for coffee. For 1 teaspoon it's listed as 10kcal. There are 17.5kcal in that amount of heavy cream. Half and half has 7.5! interesting, eh?  

Basic Real Ingredient Comparison

Of the total calories per serving (1 teaspoon or 5g) only .5g is fat. 5 fat calories. the other 5kcal are from carbs. That's the second, third and sixth ingredients: Maltodextrin (sugar) Sodium Caseinate (trace amounts of protein from milk but mostly a flavouring/texture "food additive") and more sugar.  As said, basic coffee creamer. Free when you get a black coffee at a store.

SO, what are you paying for at 20 bucks a pop? Analysis of basics: 

There is Less than half a teaspoon of "coconut oil" and less than half a teaspoon of "sugar. “ in this stuff

Looking
on amazon for non-organic sugar and coconut oil, it works out to about just under 2c for real coconut oil and just over 2c for maltodextrin - or 2.5c if using table sugar - per serving. Times 112 per container that's less than three bucks - retail.

Where's the other 17 dollars worth of retail product coming from?

The rest are little bits of stuff to give it the colour/flavour of cream and then there's the "17% proprietary blend" that includes "Citrus Aurantium, Hoodia Gordonii Extract, Green Tea Extract"  

So, LESS than 1/5 of this 5g serving (less than 1g) has these special bits in it. Let's round up and call it 1g to see what 1g of Citrus Auratium, Hoodia and Green Tea are supposed to do there.  

Hoodia extract has just about nill evidence that it "tricks the body into feeling full" and if you were going to use it, coffee may be the last place you'd pay to have it. Why? Because caffeine IS a certified, verified by a ton of studies, appetite suppresant all on its own. Also - the fat in cream cues the body towards satiety (here's a post about fat tea using some cream and some coconut oil), so no need to play around with hoodia there. But how much is needed to have any effect? well, again: no science means who knows? Guesses anecdotally go from 1500-3000mg a day. A 60 cap bottle of 250mg pills can go for 20bucks - for unknown value. Just saying.  

Green Tea extract (some more info here) - for it to have any sort of real fat burning effect, we're talking about isolating ECGC - the catachins in the green tea. And by the way, as with caffeine, some folks get heart palpatations from this stuff so approach with caution. What we do not know from this company is what the purity of the extract is. You may be paying for the sweepings of the tea house floor as 1/3 or less of that 1g of stuff in your creamer. In research studies, doses to have an effect OVER TIME included green tea with 690mg of Catechins total, of which 136mg were EGCG - but here, we don't know what makes up this extract.

One look at supplement shelves will show you how varied the amounts can be.
Fortunately there have been studies using just green tea, too, where the amounts of catechins are known - and that seems to work too - when calculating your costs).  

Then there's Bitter Orange. another debatable component for fat burning. I love how WebMD describes its use: this stuff, and caffeine and st john's wort and "low calorie diet and exercise" may help with weight loss. That's like saying an iron nail and 3.50 will get you an americano at starbucks. Mind you other studies did not even find that.  So of all this what do we have where we really can make any claims? 

Prices for the rest of the 1g for those 112 servings

If we just divided these supplements into common ways they're bottled

400 mg of GTE by now is 14 bucks for 250 caps or 6.272 for 112
400 mg hoodia is 18.99 for 180 caps or 11.82 for 112
and
170 mg is 9.49 for 60 - so need to double this - say 20 for 120 18.66

wow that's 36.75 retail for these extra bits if you were to role your own - that's more than 1.5 times the price of this concoction. That's amazing. That must be quite a deal.
OF course the only way this really works is if the main ingredient of this 17% proporietary thing is green tea extract being close to a gram and then only the tiniest bits of hoodia and bitter orange.
That way the manufacturers can say they have these three ingredients, without saying amounts.
And then again, it's not likely they're using FDA approved labs (like the supplements i was quoting) to add their inredients either.

Metabolism claims??
"Further, it increases the body’s metabolic rate by removing stress on the pancreas,"
I have no idea what that means. Stress on the pancrease? that doesn't quite make sense.
It might be more sensible to say that coconut oil’s particular kinds of fats are used more readily for fuel almost like carbs rather than being stored (citric acid cycle and all that), but even saying that, metabolism is more complicated than that, but heck, the simple truth is, eating too much is eating too much - pretty much no matter what that source is.

BOTTOM HEALTH and Cost LINE:

From the ingredients we see that this is pretty much coffee creamer powder that costs 8 bucks for 340g or, 6.22 - less than a third of what this stuff costs. Even the dairy derivative sodium casinate is present.

You are in other words PAYING THROUGH THE NOSE - for those UNKNOWN amounts of UNKNOWN quality supplements that are but for the green tea of dubious benefit for weight loss or satiety.

Alternatives:

If the concern is to be “healthy” - decrease ingestion of chemicals and increase ingestion of whole foods. Like real cream or real coconut oil.
Or if you’re trying to get leaner quicker, try a no-cal beverage like black coffee or green tea you can enjoy at near zero kcal’s and get the benefits of these real deals.

As for better fat burning and satiety?

Well, the types of fats that lead to fat burnding from coconut oil will also be found - pending the season - in organic milk/cream - along with other types of fat burning fats like CLT. So if you like dairy, organic cream is not unhealthy.  

The fat in cream also has a satiety effect and a great mouth feel without additives. If you like dairy. 
If you want the benefits of green tea extract, try exploring japanese green tea.

You can get some of the best in the world at teevana for the same amount as a pint of this stuff and you can reuse the tea leaves - from 20g of genmaicha i can get about five to seven liters (or seven big pots) - that's tea for about a week. 

Or 20bucks can get two big jars of organic coconut oil - if you don't like the taste - don't get the extra virgin: it's pretty taste-neutral. 

And sugar -well - if desperate you can get that for free where you buy your coffee.  

And skip the hoodia/bitter orange.

Bottom Bottom Line: we’re suckers for a quick fix,eh?

We are trusting creatures, especially when folks are selling things that sound great. If we're affluent enough, we'll buy it and try it.

I'm just testing the claims. and sadly, Coffee Creamer even with a literal pinch of hoodia added is still coffee creamer.

As per usual: whole real food is better and (unless super subsidized like sugar in the US and EU) cheaper than supplements.

Eat less; mostly plants, as Michael Pollan says. and Save your money - for more whole food?
just food for thought
mc
@mcphoo Follow @begin2dig

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Optimising Fat Burning on Non-HIIT days

Follow @mcphoo

We can't HIIT all the time, nor can we work steady state at the top end of our aerobic capacit all the time. Our central nervous system would come up and strangle us. That's another word for overtraining. But if we still want to make sure that we're optimizing our non-HIIT time for both endurance capacity and fat mobilization, can we do both at the same time? Outlook looks good that there's a sweet spot for such work in the 60-80% MaxHR zone.

Last week, we looked at a successful protocol for fat mobilization and showed fat loss when comparing steady state to HIIT. We might recall that of the two groups - steady state and HIIT - when there was no other change to regimen (no diet change for instance) only the HIIT group changed BF%, dropping 5 pounds plus of fat over 15 weeks. One would seem to see in this that HIIT is the best approach to get the fat off then, but there is a related question, as authors on a 2009 Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research paper puts it:

‘‘Should I exercise at a level that optimizes fat oxidation, or is total caloric expenditure the ultimate determinant of fat loss?’’Surprisingly, this fundamental question has not been answered to date, probably because of the difficulty of precisely controlling caloric intake and expenditure.

From the HIIT work, we saw that pushing anaerobically for sprints, and then recovering aerobically was great for fat mobilization. The authors, without unfortunately citing any specifics, suggest that there may be some issues with this conclusion

Those studies that have been completed generally have controlled for exercise dose, comparing highintensity, short-duration exercise with low-intensity, longduration exercise of equivalent caloric expenditure. However, nonexercise physical activity and caloric intake were not controlled, and no definitive conclusion could be reached.

I'm not sure about that and the authors get away without substantiating that claim that "no definitive conclusion could be reached". Indeed, they rather punt to say that they're not tring to figure out the optimal training intensity for fat loss. Ok, then what are they doing? They want to know

Can improvement in aerobic capacity and optimization of fat oxidation be attained
simultaneously, or are these objectives distinctly different and require different intensities of training for their attainment?

In other words if you're working out to be able to do more work at a level that is "glycogen spairing" - uses fat for fuel rather than precious muscle and blood sugar - can training to get that effect optimized also connect with fat burning? And so to get at this question, the authors say

The purpose of this study is to compare the FBZ [fat burning zone] and AZ [aerobic zone] in a group of competitive endurance athletes (runners). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to directly compare these 2 training zones in the same group of subjects. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to directly compare these 2 training zones in the same group of subjects.

As a first step, the authors make clear that it's really straight ahead to see the points at which one goes from using fat as the primary fuel to using sugars. The calcutation looks at the respiratory exchange ratio (RER). For Carbs being 100% of fuel, the RER is 1. For fat, it's .7. This can be tested by hooking a person up to a cart that collects respiratory gasses. Cool.

The authors also do a really nice job of saying what things impact on fat mobilization, too. Eg, eating carbs before exercise surpresses fat mobilization (hence the Precision Nutrition heuristic to say carb-dense foods for post-workout).

The nice thing is here, that while few of us have access to a metabolic cart (and using one isn't a lot of fun), we can use heart rate instead as a pretty good indicator of fuel type metabolized.

TO calculate Aerobic Zone, the authors used the ACSM measure: 50% of HRR (heart rate reserve) for the lower end, and anaerobic heat rate threshold for the upper end. While Anaerobic threshold is becoming an increasing question of debate (while lactate threshold has been totally toasted), the authors are just using points established by a Body, and testing against these. Good idea. There are known methods to determine AT in the lab - or what passes for tha threshold, so what the heck.

Fat burning zone was determined by watching the gas exchange readings on the cart: as soon as the ratio flipped beyond .7, one is beyond the FBZ.

Here's what the AZ/FBZ's look like:

To cut to the chase, the main result is that

for Maximum Fat Oxidation, 32 of the 36 subjects (89.0%) fell in a range of 60.2–80.0% of maximal heart rate.

And there is overlap between these two zones:

The authors' discussion of these results describes the following observations and potential uses for the findings:

the upper limit of exercise intensity for FBZ (80.0% max heart rate) is mid-range for the AZ (67.6–87.1% max heart rate). In addition, the upper limit for calories per minute (11.5) for FBZ is mid-range for AZ (9.15–-14.2 cal /min). The upper limit of fat calories per minute for FBZ (3.45) was not significantly different (t = 1.23, p = 0.225) from the lower limit of AZ (3.11). The biggest discrepancy between the 2 zones occurs when comparing fat calories expended at the upper limit of FBZ (3.45 fat cal/min) with the upper limit of AZ (1.68 fat cal/min).If the objective is metabolism of fat calories, training at the upper limits of AZ should not be recommended. If total caloric expenditure is the objective, the upper limits of AZ will be the most efficient.

One might think, well there you go: fat mobilization is below the top of the AZ and so back off from that edge. Umm, no, apparently not so fast:

In addition to more calories being expended during exercise, caloric expenditure during recovery from high-intensity exercise is greater than recovery caloric expenditure from low-intensity exercise because of the additional energy requirement of ventilation, restoration of adenosine triphosphate phosphocreatine, replenishment of glycogen stores, and body temperature elevation. Also, prolonged exercise at high intensity, as in marathon running, has shown a gradual decrease in carbohydrate oxidation and gradual increase in fat oxidation as glycogen stores become depleted. If fat calories, and not total calories, were a better predictor of weight control, we would expect endurance athletes, who spend a rather large volume of training above FBZ, to have weight control problems. This is clearly not the case.

In other words, almost as with hypertrophy training, volume has a pretty important role to play for fat mobilization, and volume here can be accrued by time. What's this mean: a few weeks ago, we looked at CoQ10's effect on endurance, and there we saw that after repeats of wingates that are pretty carb stealing, the oxidative system kicks in because those carb sources have been depleted. What this seems to suggest is that if you can stand it, working at the AZ top end for long enough will burn out the carbs and push into the fat as primary fuel source out of necessity.

That's potentially great to know for endurance athletes. But what about strength athletes working on their body comp?

Recommendations:
HIIT is generally recommended only a few times a week. And from last week's studies we saw that the bouts are only 15 mins of work long. These ranges are for the benefit of one's central nervous system.

If you still want to do fat burning work on non-HIIT days, or just more work on your HIIT days, it seems that one has a wide range of efforts to play in: 60-80% of MaxHR. So for CARDIO days when you've HIIT yourself to death and your CNS is crying for mercy, you can still do cutting by working in the 60-80% zone. Likewise, if you still have more sauce on HIIT days after 15 mins of work, you might want to add on some effort of steady state at your optimal fat burning zone.

Caveat on 60-80%. That's a heck of a big range. In some interesting reflections on their results, the authors note that we still don't know WHY there is such a range. Dietary practices alone apparently don't account for it. And in this group, we're talking really fit people too, and even in such a closely matched cadre, there was still this rather large range of values for where the OPTIMAL fat mobilization occured.

In other words, there is a LOT we don't know yet about individual variation within fat mobilization. It's not a 1:1 relationship of work this hard and get these results. The best the authors can say is with a 90% result of participants in this range, there's a good probability that work in this range will have the best likelihood of fat mobilization.

Example: Combos Applied.
All caveats considered, I had a note from a person last week responding to the HIIT work saying that he does a similar interval protocol on his bike of the 24/36 protocol doing hills as hard as he can, and then finishes up with 30 mins of work at 70% max heart rate - for him, that's his sweet spot, and fat loss has never been so fast for him as when he hit this combo.

Personally i think this is really cool to see how we can mix and match various optimizations for our goals.

Related Posts

main ref:
Carey, DG (2009). Quantifying Differences in the "Fat Burning" Zone and the Aerobic Zone: Implications For Training Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research: , 23 (7), 2090-2095 : 10.1519/JSC.0b013e3181bac5c5 Follow @begin2dig

Sunday, December 20, 2009

B2D Nutrition Article Index: All things Foodish on begin2dig

Follow @mcphoo begin2dig has a lot of posts about topics in nutrition, from discussions around nutrients (how does fat and fat burning work; what are carbs) to supplements (and quality of same), to what do various body fat percentages really look like to how rewiring the brain may be a critical part for diet success. To get a feel for b2d's take on nutrition, here's an index of articles organized from nutrients to nutrition resources. Hope this provides a useful reference point for your nutrition explorations.

Fat:

Respect the Fat: An overview of Fat Burning Goodness

Brown Fat: New Improved Single Factor Thinking

We're Happy happy Happy With our Fat - or maybe not

"Lean Muscle "- muscle is lean - do you mean lean mass?

Green Tea - good for more than what ails ya - facilitating fat burning

Carbohydrates

What's 100% whole wheat? and what is it vs sprouted wheat? or sprouted anything?

Carbohydrates: the New Fat

Carbs or Protein before Bed? Not what you think

Protein

How much protein - no really - for muscle gain, maintenance

i like this piece - cuz i'm not crazy about the conclusions. That mainly protein may well be overdone if you're talking about muscle gain, which is different than using it for diet to feel fuller on less. There's also a difference between protein synthesis and protein absorption. They are not the same. And in particular, why creatine and load may be more important than protein for *gaining* beyond what ya gain just with exercise.

What's a whole protein? and why how should/can we have them?

ever wondered this? especially if you're a vegetarian? how get a whole protein from bread and beans? or what's a super bean as a whole/complete protein?

Optimal Protein Blends - for carnivores and vegetarians alike

A Minute with Mike: BCAA's, Leucine, or Plain Old Whey - does it make a difference?

Nutrient timing *may* make difference - for strength, body comp, muscle fiber...

The Pump: What is it, Does it Work and if so How and for What Kind of Muscle Growth?

Farmed Salmon: Health and Environment Concerns. Dam

Diets
Eating: Rewiring our Instincts for Sure Fire Weight Loss

Habits and Alternatives: one step at a time dieting (within critique of P90x) (including references to Precision Nutrition, Lyle McDonald, M.Beck, and a cast of thousands)

Supplements

Supplement Curmudgeon: Does that DO anything for you?

Is what's on the label really in your supplement?

Creatine, Beta Alanine, Citrulline malate, and more b2d

Dealing with (a wretched) Cold

The Raw and The Cooked of Enzyme Supplementation

Weight Loss & Exercise
More on Exercise without Diet doesn't produce Weight Loss

Exercise doesn't work - without diet - really

Athletic Bodies: which one is you(r desired shape)?

P90X Critique Part 2 0f 3 - WIll you really "get ripped"?

Nutrient Timing
Nutrient timing *may* make difference - for strength/mass development

Minute with Mike (2 ), Post Workout Recovery Window: real or myth?

Approaches to Nutrition
What the Heck is Sustenance? Review of the Z-Health 9S Sustenance

Rewiring Habits - support for lean eating (part of a Critique of P90X )

Set Point Theory is Crap: We are Only What We Eat

Review of the "Science" claims of the Warrior Diet

Human Support is KEY for Good Eating/Diet Success

Resources
Precision Nutrition. The best source to Learn about one's self and food

Georgie Fear's Dig In: The new easy, fast, tasty, satisfying recipe book: DIG IN

Farmed Salmon: Health and Environment Concerns. Dam

Food Inc.: the unbearable lightness of the food industry

Fitness Geek Book Recommendations

Images and Approaches: Real People making Real Changes with Real Support

Athletic Bodies: which one is you(r desired shape)?

Reflection/Critique of P90X review (in Three Parts)

Motivation as Skill: a Functional Definition of same Follow @begin2dig

Saturday, September 26, 2009

"Lean Muscle "- muscle is lean - do you mean lean mass?

Follow @mcphoo Just a quicky about terminology. I've heard many folks referring to building "lean muscle" and burning fat. Even seemingly knowledgeable sites do this. Consider this wikianswer response about building "lean muscle" A review of Staley's muscle logic refers to building "lean muscle mass." Or just do a search for "lean muscle" and check how many sites come back with that

term in the title.

The thing is, muscle *is* lean in that (a) lean means wanting in fat and (b) muscle has very little fat in it. Pretty much ever. It's very particularly designed to be that way.

The "lean muscle" may come from conflating the desire for muscle gain and fat loss on the one hand and measuring "lean mass" relative to body fat % from body composition on the other.

Or maybe it's that gaining muscle is supposed to go with burning fat and hence getting lean. Not always true by the way: see "bulking."

Anyway, lean muscle may be a redundant term but it's pretty pervasive. So let's take these terms apart then:

Lean, in lean mass refers to the measurement of the body sans adipose tissue - the fat that's under the skin (and can be measured by calipers) as opposed to visceral fat, which is the stuff around our internal organs.

Body composition by the way is formally the meanure of fat, bone, muscle tissue. So a lean person - say a man below 10% body fat with a six pack starting to show - is "lean" - as in wanting in fat (that's another great word: to want, wanting - as in to lack). He may be more or less muscular at that bf% than another person who is say

bigger or smaller boned, so not everyone at a particular bf% looks the same to be sure.

Similarly someone can gain lean mass, or gain muscle, and not necessarily put much of a dent in lowering their body fat percentage (as seen recently with obese kids on exercise programs). In fact many folks will eat more to gain muscle mass, and pack on some more fat while doing so. This is partially why it's hard to gain muscle mass while reducing calories to get lean: the fuel to build the muscle mass (new tissue) isn't necessarily there (see discussion on hypertrophy here).

So, there's muscle, there's lean mass, and there's body fat. Muscle and bone is lean; fat is fat. Working to gain muscle doesn't necessitate getting lean(er), but eating at a caloric deficit may (scroll dow to see discussion on weight loss, nutrition, habits, change is pain, here for more).

Now, for most situations the above may be considered a nice distinction (nice is another cool word like want - means fussy or fastidious or jesuitical for that matter), but sometimes folks make the assumption that muscle gain means fat loss when thinking about "lean muscle gain" and since it doesn't, it may help to have this cleared up - help a person working on weight loss and fitness to have a better mental model of what's happening within us.

And so thar we go: muscle is lean already, to get lean is to drop fat, but building muscle is no guarantee of fat loss, though developed in the right circumstances, it can certainly help. Follow @begin2dig

Friday, August 14, 2009

Brown Fat: New Improved Single Factor Thinking

Follow @mcphoo Let me predict it here first, folks: Brown Fat will be the Next Big Thing in the Drive for a Single Factor Big Pill Solution to Obesity.

Put "brown fat" into google today and you'll see all sorts of clever people and magazines referencing this new study on how "brown fat" (used a lot for generating body heat in mamals and neonatals) can be used to help burn the evil "white fat" - our abundant adipose tissue.

Yes evil, says the article, in contrast to the "good fat" story from early last week i was telling. The article commences powerfully:

IN THE war on our waistlines, fat is the enemy. It is fat, or adipose tissue, that gives us our beer bellies and our love handles, our man boobs and our muffin tops. And when plastic surgeons sculpt people into slenderness, it is fat tissue they suck up and throw out with the clinical waste.

Electron micrographs of brown fat cells reveal one of their hallmarks: an extraordinary number of mitochondria, which, as described below, are involved in heat generation.
The mitochonria are typically round, with cristae across their entire width.

My favorite quote by one of the researchers from this story exemplifies single factor thinking:

"I exercise on an elliptical trainer and it's pretty hard for me to burn up 500 calories," says Ronald Kahn, head of obesity research at Harvard Medical School's Joslin Diabetes Center. "If I could do it without working and do it every day, it would be pretty great."

Wow, where to begin here? Nigh on 20 years back there was a furor that was kicked off with Matel's "Math is hard" Barbie. What that was saying to kids - young girls especially?

Here, we have a head of a medical group, reminiscent of Barbie, saying gee, working out every day is hard; wouldn't it be great if i had a pill to lose weight for me?"

THis is the height of medical research? Wouldn't it be great to have a pill? Maybe that is the height of medical research: it's not about health, well being, quality of life, but about how far can we push this single thing for that effect.

If medicine were about well being perhaps the kinds of questions it would ask would be What are the issues around such weight gain? how does behaviour (neurology) interact with physical being (physiology)? what's the forensic differences between the Lean minority and the increasingly Fat majority? whether lean or fat what are the complex beneficial interactions of eating and movement and rest/sleep on a whole range of homeostatic factors that impact well being? do they have even greater impact on any level for those who are obese? doing things like improving insulin sensitivity, bone mineral density, cardio vascular fitness, ant-aging, balance, vision, awareness, focus? Knowing these complex interplays of systems to create a myriad of positive effects, is another drug or surgical intervention a good idea?

No? so what's on offer? A pill? and if not a pill how about an invasive procedure?

Researchers are experimenting with various ways to increase the amount or activity of our brown fat, either pharmaceutically or even surgically, by extracting ordinary white fat through liposuction, transforming it into brown fat and re-implanting it. A mere 50 grams of brown fat - well within the range of what some of us already have - could dissipate around 500 calories a day

and why is this single factor thinking?

It's single factor thinking because it gets excited about saying "gee, if we could just tweak this one thing, wouldn't that be great if life were that simple...ok there may be side effects but look at that fat go...ok maybe nothing's happening with bone mineral density or strength, but look at that fat go." And some side effects like anti-anti-aging, are acknowledged:

Manipulating brown fat, whether by drugs or surgery, may not be risk-free, however. By increasing energy expenditure you generate a high-flux metabolic state, points out Celi. This could increase our exposure to potentially harmful free radicals generated by the metabolism, which could conceivably cause cancer or even hasten ageing.

But what if there's a reason that we have fewer brown fat cells as we age; maybe it helps us age better?

Enthusiasm for the potential is unquenched. Here's another quote from the same article:

Nedergaard believes the focus should be on preventing the decline in brown fat as people get older. "Most obesity appears in middle age and onwards, and this is when it seems brown fat activity starts to disappear," he says. It might be possible to identify the cause of this decline and then reverse it, perhaps by replacing a lost hormone. What this hormone might be, though, remains a mystery.

Right, well is that statement true? Increasingly, most obesity appears now in kids. The rate is growing almost exponentially, right? (remember the piece a few weeks about about resistance workouts and obese kids - and how they lost no adipose tissue?) and kids apparently have way more brown fat cells than middle age folks apparently. So, maybe obesity isn't age related, or about just brown fat cell ratios.

You know this may be exciting science and the source of many future publications and god knows how many dead rats in the process of Losing Weight, but it feels (a) arrogant and (b) taking the easy way out.

By analogy in Europe, there's laws against the sale of foods produced from GMO - genetically modified crops. Many farmers and People generally don't trust scientific manipulations in the food supply at such a vast level messing with what is perceived as Nature. There's concern that Something could go Horribly Wrong. To allude to another ancient trope for margarine commercials "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature"

Likewise the arrogance here is that we can find a Single Solution that will work in a Complex System (like us) and not think there'll be significant consequences. The taking the easy way out feels just ignorant. And in no small part disrespectful. We are complex organisms. Worse, we have psychologically reinforced habits wired up to physiological, homeostatically defined responses: we have behaviours wired into us for a non-fuel-abundant environment. And now we have abundant access to personal fuel. No wonder we're getting fatter.

Saying that, i'll say it again, it takes work and skills and practice and support to know how to change habits, to keep them changed and, initially, work against what are bodies are telling us to do: eat! The formula might be easy: eat less/move more, but the implementation is not simple, and sure as heck isn't saying gee let's just change this biological function. I bet that will be great! i won't have to work out. And we'll make lots of money to help other people not have to learn how to cook and move and learn habits of lean eating.

That sound cynical? Afterall these scientists are keen; they want to help solve an epidemic. And at least one of them is motivated to get off the eliptical. And i say Good For You - get off the elliptical and get something healthy like a kettlebell or a water rower.

But that's not what this anti exercise head of a diabetes research group is thinking - at least not as portrayed in this article. He thinks swap activity for pill. One Single Thing (workout: hard) for some Other Single Thing (pill: easy).

But we know that exercise is not a Single Thing - depending on how hard, how long, how frequently etc etc there are all sorts of effects going on inside that are good for us, hitting an abundance of systems: visual, vestibular, proprioceptive, mechanical, chemical, biological.

By comparison what does taking a pill do? We go from rich multi-factor interactions when we move to a far narrower set of internal interactions in ingesting a pill. And this from someone who should Know Better, don't you think?

-------
Thanks to Xafier for pointing out this article to me,
and let me cite Eric Cobb again for framing the notion of single factor thinking, covered in the 9S:sustenance cert. Follow @begin2dig

Monday, August 10, 2009

We're Happy happy Happy With our Fat - or maybe not

Follow @mcphoo We are amazing. We adapt to anything. Including our own states when

they are less than our once-cherished ideals. We settle. We get on. We make the best of. Or so it seems. It seems that since 1987, at least white folks' idea of an ideal weight has increased - higher BMI is ok'er. And with that, it seems, a desire to move or adjust diet has gone down. Oh dear.

A new study - indeed it's published in the future because its date is Aug 15, 2009 and it's not quite that date yet - looks at exactly the steady progress of how heavier people have become happier with heavier selves. This is pretty amazing on the one hand considering how much we're inundated with images of the Super Lean, but then perhaps not considering the reality of the Super Size (and it's another kick at set point theory being set, ha!)

In the following, therefore, i'd like to review that study and its focus pretty much on concerns around food and movement that come out of the data, and top it off with some work that considers a focus on work other than diet and movement may be in order.

And so to begin, here's the abstract of our perception changing study.

Am J Epidemiol. 2009 Aug 15;170(4):456-63. Epub 2009 Jun 22.

Ideal weight and weight satisfaction: association with health practices.

Kuk JL, Ardern CI, Church TS, Hebert JR, Sui X, Blair SN.

York University, Toronto, Canada. jennkuk@yorku.ca

Evidence suggests that individuals have become more tolerant of higher body weights over time. To investigate this issue further, the authors examined cross-sectional associations among ideal weight, examination year, and obesity as well as the association of ideal weight and body weight satisfaction with health practices among 15,221 men and 4,126 women in the United States. Participants in 1987 reported higher ideal weights than participants in 2001, an effect particularly pronounced from 1987 to 2001 for younger and obese men (85.5 kg to 94.9 kg) and women (62.2 kg to 70.5 kg). For a given body mass index, higher ideal body weights were associated with greater weight satisfaction but lower intentions to lose weight. Body weight satisfaction was subsequently associated with greater walking/jogging, better diet, and lower lifetime weight loss but with less intention to change physical activity and diet or lose weight (P < style="font-weight: bold;">Although the health implications of these findings are somewhat unclear, increased weight satisfaction, in conjunction with increases in societal overweight/obesity, may result in decreased motivation to lose weight and/or adopt healthier lifestyle behaviors.

First, it's cool to have a study say we're not exactly sure yet what to make of these finding, but something's going on. Second, the findings themselves are pretty interesting - especially considering the main sample is from three times more men than women, and this is unusual in the obesity area where folks tend to focus more on women.

So what's going on here?

The authors are motivated by a simple, intriguing question: since BMI has gone (and continues it seems to go) up, and so many people (65% in the US) are now classed as overweight, has the perception of what is a "normal" weight changed? There are some interesting tensions in that question: the research that shows obese individuals perceive higher body weight as healthy and attractive - that's one direction - and the media's still constant drive towards the other extreme with associated research showing resulting body dissatisfaction - that's the other. So where are we at, culturally, with perceptions of what's normal?

Cool question

Approach
So the researchers hit the Cooper Clinic and looked at the data from 1987 to 2001 as part of the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study. Only folks with at least 15 measures over that period were considered. It's amazing to find a data set that's relatively unchanged in the data gathering model for such a period. There are rich questions asked about health history here.

One of the key questions in the intake form is about self-reported ideal weight.

Finding: who's "ideal weight" view goes up? What the data showed is that "the slope of the rise in ideal body weight between 1987 and 2001 was greatest in obese and young adults (0.18 kg/year to 0.25 kg/year) and the smallest in older adults (–0.07 kg/year to 0.01 kg/year)."

Who's satisfied with their weight - over time? "Only 2% of obese men and one obese woman reported being satisfied with their weight. BMI, examination year, and ideal weight were all independent predictors of weight satisfaction...In the same model, with each passing examination year, weight satisfaction was 3%–4% higher (P <0.01)...Higher cardiorespiratory fitness also was independently associated with greater weight satisfaction (men: OR = 1.23, 95% CI: 1.18, 1.29; women: OR = 1.35, 95% CI: 1.23, 1.48) and less intention to lose weight (men: OR = 0.82, 95% CI: 0.76, 0.89; women: OR = 0.82, 95% CI: 0.69, 0.97; Ptrend <>"

What did folks more satisfied with weight do? The folks more satisfied with their weights had lower BMI's and lower percentages of body fat, but they also MOVED.

Weight satisfaction was also associated with higherlevels of walking/jogging per week, higher cardiorespiratoryfitness, less restrained eating, consumption of more fruitsand vegetables, and higher self-rated health compared with thosereporting body weight dissatisfaction (all P $≤$ 0.01). Body weightsatisfaction was associated with greater distance walked/joggedper week compared with those reporting body weight dissatisfaction,whereas BMI category was negatively associated with distancewalked/jogged per week (men—overweight or obese: 18.9km/week vs. 15.8 km/week, lean: 20.8 km/week vs. 18.6 km/week;women—overweight or obese: 14.4 km/week vs. 14.3 km/week,lean: 18.2 km/week vs. 17.3 km/week, respectively) after adjustmentfor age, ethnicity, and smoking for both men and women (P <0.001).

What seems interesting to me here is that there is not a lot of difference - really - in the amount moved per week between the satisfied and the dissatisfied groups. 18.9km per week vs 15.9? 3km (about two miles) separating BMI levels of happiness and health? Food for thought there. And speaking of food for thought.

For men, there was a significant interaction betweenBMI category and body satisfaction on fruit and vegetable consumptionsuch that only the overweight or obese men dissatisfied withtheir body weight consumed significantly fewer fruits and vegetables(overweight or obese: 14.9 vs. 13.6 per week; lean: 15.1 vs.15.1 per week; P = 0.01). For women, only a positive main effectof body weight satisfaction was observed (overweight or obese:17.8 vs. 15.7 per week; lean: 17.4 vs. 15.6 per week; P <0.001).

So guys who are overweight to obese and dissatisfied with their bodyweight also tend not to eat their veggies. Hmm. Interesting habit.

Intention to change. Almost everyone (93% men and 95% women) of the group who said they were dissatisfied with their weight said they planned to change their diet. About the same ratio (95%/94%) of all men and women said they planned to "change their stamina or physical condition)". 53%/63% of the whole group said they planned to change both. Folks who were happy with their weight had less intention to change their diet or workouts (duh?)

Lifetime: the magic 100. Men who'd lost more than 100 pounds over their lifetime had a lot of stuff going on than the satisfied with their weight.

higher BMI
higher ideal weight
more likely to report current dieting
subtly lower cardiovascular fitness

On the other hand with women, BMI correlated directly with weight satisfaction.

What's it all mean?
here's where the researchers reflect on their findings, and what they find, overall, is that ideal reported weight has gone up (at least in this very large group) overall, but "particularly among obese individuals."

There main concerns is that younger overweight/obese folks are progressively happier, it seems with higher body weights (going up .3kg/year). Here's the crucial thing: higher body weight correlating with lower ratings of body weight dissatisfaction was also coupled with less intention to move, less consumption of fruit and veg, but also ironically more caloric restriction cycles with higher total pounds of fat lost (but not kept off) over a life time.

In other words, a lot of dieting cycles without super food choices that don't translate into persistent weight loss.

What the researchers are unsure of, is how to leverage these findings strategically for effective change. Is weight disatisfaction a good thing to help motivate change? How would that work, though, without a lot of readily available support? - Good questions.

These resaerchers are also concerned that of those disatisfied in weight who express an interest to change their diet don't also express an interest to change their activities - they feat that without getting physical activity into the mix, weight loss doesn't stick. I'm not so sure about that but am keen to check out the papers they cite to support that concern. If you wish to do so, too, here are the sources:

Diaz VA, Mainous AG III, Everett CJ. The association between weight fluctuation and mortality: results from a population-based cohort study. J Community Health (2005) 30(3):153–165.[CrossRef][Web of Science][Medline]
Nguyen ND, Center JR, Eisman JA, et al. Bone loss, weight loss, and weight fluctuation predict mortality risk in elderly men and women. J Bone Miner Res. (2007) 22(8):1147–1154.[CrossRef][Medline]
Rzehak P, Meisinger C, Woelke G, et al. Weight change, weight cycling and mortality in the ERFORT Male Cohort Study. Eur J Epidemiol (2007) 22(10):665–673.[CrossRef][Web of Science][Medline]
Provencher V, Bégin C, Tremblay A, et al. Short-term effects of a "health-at-every-size" approach on eating behaviors and appetite ratings. Obesity (Silver Spring) (2007) 15(4):957–966.[CrossRef][Medline]
Saris WH, Blair SN, van Baak MA, et al. How much physical activity is enough to prevent unhealthy weight gain? Outcome of the IASO 1st Stock Conference and consensus statement. Obes Rev. (2003) 4(2):101–114.[CrossRef][Medline]
Martins C, Robertson MD, Morgan LM. Effects of exercise and restrained eating behaviour on appetite control. Proc Nutr Soc. (2008) 67(1):28–41.[CrossRef][Web of Science][Medline]

Today indeed in Science Daily, there's another cry to add to the above that the sedentary are setting themselves up for huge health collisions. Move it Move It. But as i'll come to below, the question may be if movement is such a great thing, why aren't folks doing it, hmm? Quit yelling at doctors to tell patients to move. Where's the support? This is sort of what the speaker, Steven Blair, is quoted as saying, too.

We need numerous changes to promote more physical activity for all, including public policies, changes in the health care system, promoting activity in educational settings and worksites, and social and physical environmental changes. We need more communities where people feel comfortable walking. I believe psychologists can help develop better lifestyle change interventions to help people be more active via the Internet and other technological methods.

but i digress...

Limitations

The authors acknowledge that while the data they have is a super sample size looking at the same folks over a considerable amount of time (a) it's 95% white folks and (b) the measures are limited. For instance diet and movement were only assesed by single points like fruit and veg consumption and walking/jogging distance. And of course, these data are all self-reported, not objectively measured.

But where self-reporting might normally be an issue in a study if that's the sole measure, it's intriguing the authors highlight it, since after all, this study is about self-perception - and it's intriguing to see how one self-reports practice against attitude - regardless of objective accuracy - but maybe that's just me. And just in this case.

humans on the spaceship in Wall-E are sedentary blimps (above)
who see themselves as svelt (below)

Bottom Line
People (at least in the ACL study) are happier being heavier. That their ideal weights have increased across the board. Higher BMI's are ok. And this mayn't be ok. Let me quote the authors:

In conclusion, we have provided evidence that, in the AerobicsCenter Longitudinal Study group, there have been secular increasesin ideal weight perception, which relate to increased body satisfactionfor a given BMI. Body weight satisfaction is associated withlower intentions to change weight, physical activity/stamina,or diet. In combination with the known consequences of obesity,failure to change lifestyle factors may further compound futurehealth problems.

Another Line
While these authors' work shows a thought-provoking trend around getting comfy with being heavier and more sedentary, work by Susan Roberts from Tufts, and her colleagues, has looked more at some of the *why's* behind the effect that gets folks overweight in the first place: eating more.

The authors of the current study touch briefly on the success of various approaches that look less at calories and more at behaviour/attitude around food, and say more work needs to be done to see how successful such non-calorie focused approaches are, and that may be true.

But when looking at Roberts' work, it's hard to deny what her colleague Nicolas Hayes and she found in looking at a particular age group of gals

1: Obesity (Silver Spring). 2008 Jan;16(1):52-8.

Aspects of eating behaviors "disinhibition" and "restraint" are related to weight gain and BMI in women.

Hays NP, Roberts SB.

D.W. Reynolds Department of Geriatrics, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System, Little Rock, Arkansas, USA. NPHays@uams.edu

OBJECTIVE: The causes of adult weight gain leading to obesity are uncertain. We examined the association of adult weight gain and obesity with subscales of eating behavior characteristics in older women.
METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Current height and weight, eating behavior subscales (disinhibition subscales-habitual, situational, and emotional; restraint subscales-flexible and rigid; hunger subscales-internal and external) as assessed using the Eating Inventory (EI), and self-reported body weight at six prior age intervals were reported by 535 women aged 55-65 years. Multiple regression analysis was used to examine the relationships between EI subscale scores and weight change from the age interval of 30-39 to 55-60 years and current BMI.
RESULTS: The strongest correlate of weight gain over 20 years was susceptibility to overeating in response to everyday cues within the environment (habitual disinhibition; partial correlation coefficient (r) = 0.25, P < r =" 0.17,"> and susceptibility to overeating in response to specific situations such as social occasions (situational disinhibition) was not associated with weight gain. Flexible control of dietary restraint attenuated the influence of habitual disinhibition in particular on weight gain and BMI, and was less effective in attenuating associations of emotional or situational disinhibition.
DISCUSSION: Lifestyle modification programs for prevention and treatment of adult-onset obesity currently focus on reducing situational and emotional overeating; the results of this study suggest that a stronger emphasis on strategies that target habitual overeating may be warranted.

In other words, what work Roberts' has been doing for the past while keeps showing is the strong correlation between eating as a response to particular situations and stressors. Consequently, one might say that looking at diet and activity alone (as the ACL study review above about ideal weight perception) is likely not going to be a solution for meaningful and lasting change towards health and healthy body weight.

Consider that the self-reporting in the ACL shows that the folks most dissatisfied with their own weight are those most likely to be dieting and have lost more weight overall than others more satisfied. Roberts' and Colleagues work tends to suggest that unpacking what's going on there and helping folks with those habitual responses may be key. She is certainly not alone in this view, but her work puts numbers and facts on this approach: dealing with habits is tough, but critical for health and well being. Follow @begin2dig

Friday, August 7, 2009

Respect the Fat: An overview of Fat Burning Goodness

Follow @mcphoo We hear it all the time: fat is bad; we have too much; we need to shed the fat. Yes sure, leaner is better for health. But that doesn't mean either that fat is bad or that ingesting the right kinds of fats (yup, there are kinds) is bad. Quite the opposite.

In fact, fat is our biggest and one might argue most versatile sources of fuel. It also makes up the shell of every cell in our body, and is part of a host of other essential for life processes that happen inside us. But the focus of this post is on how fat contributes to providing us with the fuel we need and use in every breath we take.

Fat is amazing. It's the most abundant fuel source in the

body.
Every time we breath we're using fat to help take care of the energy needs of our bodies, whether thats muscular activity of lifting something, or the chemical activity of digesting something, or the transport activity of moving something from one cell to another.

In each of these cases, Fat contributes the lion's share of the energy to our physical processes. We couldn't live without it: adipose tissue affords protection to our body's various systems as well as immediate fuel storage sources; the membranes of cells are part fat and enable standard operations of the heart and lungs to get nutrients throughout our systems. And, it's also an energy reserve. Like having a bunch of batteries in the cupboard ready for when the smoke alarm or flashlight fails. Swap out the old cells put in the new.

Despite these great capacities, most of us want to shed some extra weight. Indeed, we know that it's our incredible ability to store fuel resources that works to our socio-cultural detriment in a society where fuel-as-food is readily and cheaply abundant. We put on extra weight. We carry reserves in excess of what we need given the ready abundance of fuel around us. And there are some pretty nasty health costs to carrying around that much surplus fuel, too. Type II diebetes, metabolic syndrome, additional load on joints, etc.

And so we look for ways to burn it off.

The goal of this article is to take a 50thousand foot view (ie really simplified view) at part of what's going on with that burn off, and why therefore fat is our super fuel and seemingly super nemesis.

What i mean by simplified view? Here's a map of the metabolic process:

A metabolic map, indicating the reactions of intermediary metabolism and the enzymes that catalyze them. Over 500 different chemical intermediates, or metabolites, and a greater number of enzymes are represented here. ((c) 1997 20th edition, designed by and courtesy of D. E. Nicholson, University of Leeds , U. K., and the Sigma Chemical Co. )

We're considering a wee fraction of this entire process, and only part of what's going on as illustrated below (source):

The three stages of catabolism. Stage I: Proteins, polysaccharides, and lipids are broken down into their component building blocks, which are relatively few in number. Stage II: The various building blocks are degraded into the common product, the acetyl groups of acetyl-CoA. Stage III: Catabolism converges to three principal end products: water, carbon dioxide, and ammonia

These maps help to get that this is complex cool stuff. we are amazing. The above maps let us ask the question - how do we get the good stuff out of fat to use? and to appreciate how a little bit of fat goes a really really long way. To get to that, we need to consider what energy from fat means. And that means taking a look at ATP, the primal fuel block (what fat and other nutrients in large part become), and also situating fat a bit relative to other nutrients like carbs and protein in this fuel-making process (nothing shines out like a comparison). We'll take a wee look at what can increase the fat burn in cells (mitochondria) and finally, where this should lead: why fat, while it burns all the time, is still a challenge to shed.

Energy from Fat
Anyone who's spent time counting calories likely knows that the standard wisdom about calories is that carbs are 4kcal per gram and so is protein. Fat however is 9kcal per gram. Remember a calorie is a measurement of energy: the amount of energy to raise 1 g of water 1 degree.

Right from the outset, it looks like fat has the advantage in providing us with more energy than either carbs or protein. Looks like about twice as much. That's true. But what is really cool about fat is that it gives us more useable fuel for the body to do its lifting, chemical processing and transporting than we get from protein or carbs, and that's in terms of it's translation from a fat to ATP.

ATP
ATP or adenosine triphosphate. ATP is what powers all the energy in cells.

We hear a lot about ATP in the body building world and general strength training: in big lifts the point of that long recovery is to replenish phosphocreatine stores that can make a little bit of ATP available without the presence of oxygen - like when we hold our breath, or exhale out, to do that big dead lift, or keep our head under water for that 50m sprint to the end of the pool. 1 molecule of phosophocreatine when it's broken down into ATP yields only a few ATP molecules. That's not a lot for intense work, but it can re-synthesize quickly for short 30sec bursts.

But what about for efforts that last longer than 30secs? Then we start getting into carb and fat world. Protein is used for very little energy - 2-5% - it has other jobs. If no other source of fuel is available for energy - no carbs say after a workout and you use protein - a chunk of that protein will be used as fuel - transformed into carb-like fuel for replenishing energy stores. And when folks take on more protein than can be used for any current physical requirements, protein will be translated into fat.

Digression on Protein and Starvation
Here's the other thing about Protein as fuel: some folks find that when they're working out and dieting at the same time, it seems their fat loss stalls out. That's a well-studied phenomena that if the body has fat for fuel, and it feels like it's being starved (only recieving 50% or more of the needed cals for maintenance), it will horde fat for as long as possible, and will start to catabolize (break down) other sources in our bodies for fuel. Protein from muscle is a goody.

So often folks starting an exercise program after they've started dieting need to INCREASE their calories a bit to off set starvation.

Now if someone persists at starvation levels long enough, the weight will come off. The famous Minnesota experiment demonstrated this action.

So back to ATP - and ATP from our nutrients.

The body stores only 80-100g of ATP at a time. So it has to synthesize ATP all the time.
A huge point of taking in food is to convert these fuels into ATP. Without going into the detail here, here's where fat comes into its own: a molecule of glucose (stuff from carbs generally), depending on the source, produces 36 or 38 molecules of ATP. 1 fatty acid molecule (derived from fat sources) produces 460 molecules of ATP. That's considerably more than 10 times the amount of usable fuel for muscular, chemical and transport activities than carbs.

Why is this? Basically the way fat breaks down more of it can be translated into ATP than carbs. If you look at the second big map above, you'll see that carbs have to go through three intermediate steps before they get to acetlyCoA. Fat can go pretty much directly to that stage.
Fewer steps, less stuff used for other things than ATP...

The process of how these various translations of a food into a bundle of energy occurs is really cool. It's a testament to how adaptable we are. For instance if we don't have enough carbs in our bodies for the jobs carbs are used to do - like feed our brains and liver - the body will translate fat into carb substitute. This process is the subject of books like Lyle McDonald's excellent review called the Ketogenic Diet.

Why bother with carbs at all if Fat is so awesome? and is that the secret of these "low carb" diets?

Fat burns in the flame of carbohydrate.
One of the best ways to stoke fat to burn is in the presence of carbs - this has to do with stuff in the Citric Acid Cycle. When carbs aren't present and the body has to go ketogenic to use fats instead, well, it can do it, but it's not necessarily optimal. You can skip this next bit if you wish but some folks have asked for a bit more explanation of what this Flame means. So the following digression:

Always on, All the time - when possible
remember that all our energy systems are in play pretty much all the time. There's a little bit of glycolysis (carb burning) happening along with beta-oxidation (fat burning) even when we're at rest.

a by-product of the whole carb burning process is oxaloacetate (OOA). It connects with Acetyl-CoA to form citrate, and that gets processed in the citric acid cycle and ATP is produced.

Duel types of fat
Now here's the cool thing. Fat is so versatile it can get used as fuel a couple of ways. One of these - that produces the MOST ATP is via getting it into the citric acid cycle (see diagram above). This is what FFA's - free fatty acids do. Fat also becomes available as fuel as Glycerol. When you're low on carbs, it's glycerol that gets used as carbs (via gluconeogenisis) - whether you're doing a heavy workout or doing a ketogenic diet. BUT a molecule of glycerol only produces 19 ATP molecules.

FFA's Rock
Compare this rate of ATP availability with what FFA's do when they can enter the krebs cycle. Without getting into the Krebs cycle, fat conversion is also a relatively slow process so that pathway won't get energy to the muscles super quick. Which partially explains why even if you're on a ketogenic diet, most folks recommend getting some carbs into your system prior to a workout in particular for better available energy - and fat utilization. Now this is not to say that we don't adapt in a ketogenic situation to get the turnover of fat into carb substitute happening faster, and when loads are reasonable, all could feel ok. But even so, that rate can't compete with FFA going through the citric acid cycle.

Fuel from FFA is FFA going into Citric Acid Cycle (burning in the flame of carb)
first step is beta-oxidation of a FFA: cleaving off a couple of carbons from the fat (see first image by the battery) and we get products NADH and FADH2 which can form up into acetylCoA which can hook up with OOA to do the citric acid dance. This cycle in turn breaks down the acetylCoA into co2 and H. The H come out of the citric acid cycle to oxidize via something called phosphorylation. The result is 460 ATP from FFA conversion to energy.

SO this is why fat burns and really BURNS up in the flame of carbohydrate.

And just a note: that even diets that cut out grains and other what we might call fast carbs (fast to become avilable as fuel) to go ketogenic, even here one is encouraged to eat veggies. Lots of them. Why? carbs are part of our natural metabolic process. A third of our energy comes from carbs. Our brains like carbs. Our fat burning engine likes carbs; our muscles like carbs. In balance.

And fat in something called "slow glycolosis" (part of the Krebs Cycle, pictured as the ring in the second figure above) loves carbs to let it burn baby burn. Now before anyone jumps on me, no Fat does not REQUIRE carbs to help it break down into the stuff that enters the KC to become ATP but it is sort of the path of least resistance, perhaps, if i can put it that way.

And just to repeat what may well be obvious to all:
fat burns as fuel via the happily fairly constant activity of breathing. Fat is "oxidized" to break

down into fuel. This oxidation takes place in the mitochondria of the cell. Hence it's important to have rather a lot of it as we breath so much.

Aside: Fat Burners. We may also recall that the discussion last week about super intense low volume 6min. workouts a week created as many new mitochondrias (ie fat burners) as did 1-2 hours a week of steady state cardio. Want to enhance fat burning? combined with diet, enhancing mitochondira helps.

I dunno, just thinking about all the things a bit of fat does it once again strikes me how incredibly amazing we are. So versatile. We can fuel ourselves up with just about anything we ingest. Our systems have preferences but can adapt to circumstances. Wild.

And fat is wild because it does so much for us.

Losing/Burning Fat - Hard Homeostatic or Hard Habit?
But you may be asking if we're burning fat (converting it into ATP pretty much constantly), why are we Fat? Why is fat hard to lose?

I guess the question might be reframed as is fat hard to lose?

What is hard, it seems, when food is so easily available to us, in ways historically unprecedented, we follow our ancient wiring and we eat. We want to load up for the lean times. But we don't live in scarcity. Access to ready prepared food continues to increase. Our need for these responses to horde up are less appropriate.

see

Hays NP and Roberts SB. Aspects of Eating Behaviors "Disinhibition" and
"Restraint" Are Related to Weight Gain and BMI in Women. Obesity 2008:16,
52–58. doi:10.1038/oby.2007.12.

So perhaps what's hard is the habits around caloric restriction: being patient enough with ourselves to learn new habits to support some caloric restriction to lose weight. To be patient with ourselves that fat loss takes time. While the inital excess fat may come off faster, those last ten pounds are killers, and there are reasons for this too that i've discussed elsewhere.

And without habits to support ongoing lean attitudes, then how do we keep the weight coming off? and then how do we maintain our goal weight?

I've said it before, its this need for habits around food rather than specific diets that i like precision nutrition. It supports habits.

Rewiring for Fat: Love your Fat; Burn your Fat; Respect the Fat
So while we are wired to grab store and horde fuel, we can adapt our behaviours to be lean in the face of abundance. Once we start turning on those habits, we do need to tune them to optimize fat burning. The basic part of fat burning is to get the balance of eat less right with whatever activity one is at, so one stays productively above starvation level.

Being patient with ourselves to learn what that sweet spot mix of caloric restriction and workout effort to optimize fat burning - if that's the priority - takes time, patience, and a strategy to be able to assess if what's being tried works. Again, i'll say i like precision nutrition becuase it has a method called an Individualization Guide to support exactly that process.

Calorie Note: Why only 3500kcals to drop a Pound of Fat?
Some folks have noticed a seeming discrepancy between cals in a pound of fat and that there are fewer calories to burn a pound of "fat"

I'm still looking for sources on this, but here's the argument: let's start with the basics.
1g of fat = 9kcal
so 1kg of fat =9000kcal

9000/2.2 = 4091kcal / pound of fat (1kg/2.2=1lb)

Apparently a pound of human fat is made up of 10% water + 5% other materials that aren't digested - i need sources to support this, but if we go with that for a moment

4091 -15%= 3477.35

That's approx 3500kcals.

One other frequently quoted statement on the web is "Human fat tissue contains about 87% lipids, so that 1 kg of body-fat tissue has roughly the caloric energy of 870 g of pure fat, or 7800 kcal."
- just put that quote into google and it will show up on a dozen sites - but no primary source for it. - still that conveniently gets to the well cited 3500kcal/lb of (human) fat.

The closest i have to a real source for such info is

Adipose tissue contains 82-88% fat, 2-2.6% protein, and 10-14% water. The energy yield of adipose tissue is 8000-9000 kcal (34-38 MJ) per kg or 3600-4000 kcal (15.1-16.8 MJ) per pound.

and that's at Answers.com, and i've no idea who writes this stuff for them or from where they get it.

Higher Up and Further In
if you're intersted in going deeper into the physiology here, may i recommend
Exercise Physiology: Energy, Nutrition, and Human Performance, 6th Ed.
McArdle, Katch & Katch (US| UK)
There's a 7th ed coming in November 09.

If you get really intrigued, for after the above, there's Brook's bioenergetics, referenced in the side bar book recommendations

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