Lower Your Cholesterol Naturally

Yesterday my post concerned testing for inflammation. I have posted an article about belly fat and how it might double death risk. Well now researchers have confirmed that fat cells inside the abdomen are secreting molecules that increase inflammation. It’s the first evidence of a potential link between abdominal fat and systemic inflammation.

For years, scientists have been aware of a relationship between disease risk and excess belly fat. “Apple-shaped” people, who carry fat in the abdomen, have a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes and other problems than “pear-shaped” people, who tend to store fat in the hips and thighs.

Too much abdominal fat is associated with a defect in the body’s response to insulin.

Using liposuction to remove excess belly fat won’t help either. In 2004, investigators found that removing abdominal fat with liposuction did not provide the metabolic benefits normally associated with similar amounts of fat loss brought about by dieting or exercising.

“Despite removing large amounts of subcutaneous fat from beneath the skin — about 20 percent of a person’s total body fat mass — there were no beneficial medical effects,” said Samuel Klein, M.D., the Danforth Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Science and the senior investigator on both studies. “These results demonstrated that decreasing fat mass by surgery, which removes billions of fat cells, does not provide the metabolic benefits seen when fat mass is reduced by lowering calorie intake, which shrinks the size of fat cells and decreases the amount of fat inside the abdomen and other tissues.”

A body stores fat as two basic types: subcutaneous and visceral. Liposuction, as mentioned above, removes fat from beneath the skin or subcutaneous fat. This fat does not secrete molecules that affect inflammation. Visceral fat – fat found close to the intestines and other internal organs – was found likely to secrete molecules that contribute to increases in systemic inflammation and insulin resistance.

The researchers sampled blood from the portal vein in obese patients undergoing gastric bypass surgery and found that visceral fat in the abdomen was secreting high levels of an important inflammatory molecule called interleukin-6 (IL-6) into portal vein blood.

Increased IL-6 levels in the portal vein correlated with concentrations of an inflammatory substance called C-reactive protein (CRP) in the body. High CRP levels are related to inflammation, and chronic inflammation is associated with insulin resistance, hypertension, type 2 diabetes and atherosclerosis, among other things.

Related Blogs