How to Eviscerate Visceral Fat

This letter will review data from an 18-month human randomized controlled trial and give you actionable take-aways to reduce visceral fat.

The following letter will review content covered in today’s YouTube video. If you watch the video already, you can skip down to the sections “Nutrients Guide” and/or “Roasting Nuts” for additional information not covered in the video.

What is Visceral Fat?

Visceral fat is the fat that sits arounds your internal organs and - beyond just contributing to a beer gut - it’s particularly pro-inflammatory and strongly linked to poor metabolic and poor cardiovascular health.

If there’s a type of body fat you want to minimize, it’s visceral fat.

And while it’s not really possible to “spot reduce” different deposits of subcutaneous fat – as in you can’t really tell your body to draw fat from your personal aesthetic problem area – visceral fat is different tissue than subcutaneous fat.

So, stands to reason that you could alter metabolic conditions such that visceral becomes more mailable, sensitive and cooperative at being burned off your body.

The Study: Methods and Results

This was an 18-month long randomized trial involving people with obesity that compared 3 diets:

• 1 “healthy eating guidelines” diet

• 2 different low-carb Mediterranean diets.

Both low-carb Mediterranean diets included ~80 grams of carbs for the majority of the trial and were designed to contain the same number of calories and carbohydrates. Both were geared towards more unsaturated fats and included one ounce of walnuts per day.

But the one of the low-Carb mediterranean diets was differentiated by the addition of 3-4 cups of green tea per day plus supplementation with Wolffia globosa duckweed. This particular low-carb diet was called the “green-MED” diet.

Now, on Wolffia globosa, this is a really interesting vegetable that I hadn’t heard of before.

• It’s the smallest known flowering plant.

• It’s relative high in protein.

• It’s good source of B12 which is unusual for plants.

• And, it’s being studied for space agriculture as a protein source. Cool!

Now the green tea and duckweed were added to provide an additional 800 mg/d of particular polyphenolic compounds, the relevance of which I’ll explain after I reveal the results.

Both low-carb Mediterranean diets outperformed the “healthy eating” control diet, and the Green-MED diet with the green tea and Wolffia globosa generally trended to have an edge.

But what was most striking was the degree to which the Green-MED diet lost visceral fat, with over 3 times the visceral fat loss of the healthy eating diet and over 2 times the visceral fat loss of the other low-carb diet, with over >14% visceral fat loss.

Why Did the Green-MED diet Burn Visceral Fat?

In the authors words, the different in preferential visceral fat loss “may be explained by differential sensitivity to lipolytic stimulation hormones,” which can be influenced by specific components of the Green-MED diet, including compounds in the green tea and/or duckweed.

Or, in simple terms:

Things in your diet, environment and lifestyle can impact the receptors and sensitivity on different body tissues and organs differently.

And figuring out how to fine-tune the sensitivities of different organs is how we manipulate body composition and burn more visceral fat.

Now, back to specifics…

The study also found that levels of the polyphenols hippuric acid and urolithin A were also associated with visceral fat loss. So, perhaps these circulating compounds were the agents sensitizing the visceral fat.

• Indeed, hippuric acid is a known marker of metabolic health.

• And urolithin A is already known as “anti-obesity” agent that can increase energy expenditure by increasing thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue and inducing browning of white adipose tissue.

But it gets more complicated because these two compounds are primarly made from precursors by bacteria in your intestines.

• Urolithin A (not found in the diet) is made by gut microbes from ellagitannins, which is in fact found in green tea, Wolffia globosa, and walnuts.

• Hippuric acid is also made by gut bacteria from benzoic acid, and is associated with more microbiome diversity.

Thus, generation of these compounds will depend in part on direct dietary input of precursors, but also on the host’s (your individual) microbiome composition, which interacts with your overall dietary pattern and metabolic health. So, it’s a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. Hopefully that makes sense.

Simply put, it’s not just it’s not just about individual inputs, but how they interact with the host (you).

Nutrients Guide

Below are listed foods by relative content of a given nutrient, understanding there is decent variation ever for a specific food item.

Ellagitannins, which gets converted into Urolithin A

• Berries, especially cloudberries, artic bramble, raspberries, strawberries, and sea buckthorn. Note: High latitude berries, e.g. cloudberries and artic bramble, appear to be particularly rich in ellagitannins.

• Other fruit: Pomegranate.

• Nuts: Walnuts are highest in ellagitannins, followed by Hazelnuts, Pecans and Almonds.

• Teas: Green teas and Cistus incanus tea, particularly from Turkey, Albania, and Greece .

• Wine: Particularly Blackberry wine made with Andean blackberries. Some have ellagitannins contents as high as ~1200 mg/L.

Hippuric Acid and/or Benzoic Acid (benzoic acid is converted into hippuric acid)

• Berries: Including bilberries, strawberries, raspberries, and cloudberries. Note: The highest benzoic acid appears to be the Scottish Strawberry, with ~1300 mg/kg benzoic acid.

• Dairy Products: Cheeses and Yogurts contain benzoic acid. Note: Fermented dairy and blue cheeses have additional probiotic benefits.

Roasting Nuts

Since walnuts were mentioned in this video and letter, I’ve gotten some questions about roasting nuts because - in general - it’s not a great idea to heat fragile fats, including those in walnuts. Here is a hot tip:

It’s best to roast your own nuts at home using temperatures at or below 265 - 285 F (130 - 140 C) for less than or equal to 20 minutes.

This rule of thumb should work well for most nuts.

The exception is macadamia nuts, which are lower in fragile polyunsaturated fat and higher in more heat-stable monounsaturated fat. Even at 300 °F, macadamia nuts should be okay, i.e. their fats won’t be damaged.

In fact, if you roast equal amounts of macadamia and walnuts at 300 F, the macadamia will end up with 1/30th the oxidized fats!

So, moral of the story - at least with respect to walnuts and other polyunsaturated fat-rich nuts is they can be healthy, but best not to overheat them.