AnUser
#22
I think most people are addicted, and that’s fine, most people drink coffee or tea all the time as well. I’d say the food for the past 10,000 years have been addictive if someone could afford it. Bread for example is hyperpalatable. Most people are ‘functioning addicts’. The fruits and the vegetables have also been selected to be most addictive, any bitter tones or annoying seeds have been bred out. Salt makes it more addictive as well. It’s quite a peculiar situation.
Someone who eats rice for the first time without and with added salt speaks volumes:
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Funny and true. I forget to add a pinch of salt to my steelcut oats occasionally. Dramatic difference.
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RapMet
#24
Surprisingly, the only food that I prefer without salt is rice (got the first taste from Asian cuisine, and loved it, unsalted and no fat, just plain old steamed white rice. yummy lol). Everything else I wouldn’t even eat it unless it is salted.
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KarlT
#25
I’m a little confused. Visceral fat is bad, but subcutaneous is not horrible right?
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I was under the impression that its all bad, but visceral is worse.
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Ectopic fat is the bad fat
Fat in muscle causes insulin resistance
Fat in organs reduces functionality
Fat in places with poor blood flow causes chronic inflammation (fat cells die)
Subcutaneous fat is okay but everybody has a different amount of storage. This is why some people can be skinny fat.
This is what I’ve been told by my podcast guests.
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So - My understanding of what “ectopic fat” is defined as, is fat in places where it “usually” shouldn’t be. Is that your understanding also?
What is the best way to measure “ectopic fat”? Dexa?
Most body fat is subcutaneous, just below the skin. Hidden fat is known as visceral body fat – stored deep inside the abdomen – and ectopic fat, which accumulates in the liver, heart, pancreas and muscles. Visceral fat, which surrounds some of the vital organs, has been known for many years to cause insulin resistance and pose a risk for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. More recently, evidence has shown that ectopic fat also increases risk for these diseases.
What Is Ectopic Fat?
Ectopic literally means “in an abnormal place” – fat that collects where it does not belong. If you’ve heard of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, that is a type of ectopic fat. It’s insidious and often goes undetected. But just like visceral fat, ectopic fat can interfere with cellular and metabolic functions and increase risks of serious health problems, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke.
How do you know if you have a hidden fat problem? People with large waistlines and high body mass index (BMI) measurements are most at risk. But even those with flat stomachs and normal BMI can have hidden fat that puts them at risk, says UH cardiologist Ian Neeland, MD.
“In a clinical setting, a six-minute MRI scan can quantify fat deposits around the body,” says Dr. Neeland, Director of the UH Center for Cardiovascular Prevention. “We can screen people at high risk and detail their risk. We can do the scans quickly and safely.”
and
Visceral Obesity with Excess Ectopic Fat: A Prevalent and High-Risk Condition Requiring Concerted Clinical and Public Health Actions
About 60% of all deaths result from noncommunicable chronic diseases that are largely attributed to 4 behaviours: smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, poor nutritional habits, and lack of physical activity.
Cardiometabolic imaging studies have consistently found that the health risk of overweight and obesity is largely determined by the accumulation of fat in the abdomen (excess visceral adiposity) which is a good marker of an accumulation of toxic lipids in normally lean tissues such as the heart, the liver, the skeletal muscle, the kidney, and the pancreas, a condition that has been described as ectopic fat deposition.
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Great info! Thanks!
Yes, ectopic = in wrong place.
Dexa is best affordable method. It is probably not accurate enough to measure 1 percentage point changes, especially if using different machines / operators. But I think it is accurate enough.
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I don’t know who this “we” is you’re talking about. But logic clearly dictates that bein’ fat ain’t no good.
You and the we can label whatever however you like. But there is a much higher percentage of fat KIDS now than there was ONE generation ago. That should frighten anyone.
Obesity means your fat cells are full. So they send out signals that “hey. There’ll be extra fat and glucose yall”. But nobody else (primarily liver n muscles) can store it either. So inflamation and high glucose and high trigs ensue.
Fat is an organ. Obesity is organ failure. That leads to further organ failure. A human with 2 broken organs won’t last long…
If longevity is something you’re thinkin bout, first thing to do is get rid of as much fat as you can. Primarily through diet - seed oils give ya a ravenous appetite - have you seen which foods have seed oils? Every dang one of em. Stick to meat, fruit, vegies and not too much. But also through exercise to reset your appetite from DUMB back to smart.
(Wonder if she’ll be back or if she’s just kickin up drama…)
@RapAdmin Heres good info on insulin resistance with a reference to ectopic / visceral fat
My summary of article — 16 causes of Insulin resistance
- Visceral and Ectopic Fat
- Chronic Hyperinsulinemia — always snacking on high glycemic index foods and drinks?
- Inflammation - acute and chronic, to provide/leave fuel for immune cells
- Low Muscle Mass
- Physical Inactivity — Even just 14 days of reduced activity led to a substantial reduction in insulin sensitivity, which in this case was associated with a measurable decline in muscle mass and an increase in fat mass.
- Stress - cortisol and adrenaline
- Sleep deprivation
- Dysfunctional Gut Microbiota
- Circadian Rhythm Out of Sync
- Puberty
- Pregnancy
- Certain Medications — anti-retroviral drugs, which are drugs to treat HIV infection, 2nd generation antipsychotics, and corticosteroids.
- Certain Medical Conditions — includes all acute infections and all chronic inflammatory conditions, including autoimmune diseases. Next on the list are conditions that affect hormone levels in your body. Thyroid disease is a common one, as both hyper- and hypothyroid conditions have been linked to insulin resistance,
- Menopause
- Old age — This age-related loss of muscle mass is called sarcopenia. There also seem to be functional and molecular changes in aging muscle that contribute to muscle insulin resistance. Aging also is associated with a shift in body fat distribution, with a reduction in subcutaneous fat mass and an increase in visceral fat mass. So, in other words, the personal fat threshold seems to decline with aging, and we may gain visceral fat even if we don’t gain fat mass overall.
- A Poor Diet — more details to come regarding dietary factors, including calorie intake, alcohol, a variety of vitamins, minerals, and trace elements, advanced glycation end products, the role carbohydrates, fat, protein, and certainly also the effects of specific carbs or fats such as fructose, long-chain saturated fatty acids, medium- and short-chain fatty acids; probiotics and prebiotics, different spices, and supplements
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@RapAdmin Here is the study referenced by @ConquerAging. His VFM (visceral fat mass) is 263 grams with a body fat percentage of around 10% (from memory). Pretty good but that’s no surprise.
Based on Dexa, I am at 423 grams VFM with a 16% body fat. My VFM is a 5th percentile (good) value for my age but I’m still working it down to see if it has any effect on my markers.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/oby.23779
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Charts from study.
You can see that VFM increases with age for the same body fat percentage. There is some driving fat to places where it causes harm as we age. So we have to focus on VFM more as we age.
You can also see that almost no one has a healthy VFM, particularly in middle age and beyond. It is much worse for me.
No surprises here but perhaps some targets. Get VFM as low as possible without losing muscle mass. I am aiming for 250 grams of VFM (measured earlier this year at 423g). Does that mean I need to get down to 10% body fat? I don’t know. Perhaps a lot of HIIT will drive down VFM more than other fat stores.
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The Chemical Reasons Why Visceral Fat Is Dangerous
The associated compounds damage DNA and mitochondria.
The Paper:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acel.14367
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Body “roundness” increases Stroke Risk
Association between body roundness index and stroke results from the 1999-2018 NHANES (open access)
Conclusions and relevance
There is a nonlinear positive correlation between BRI and stroke, according to this national cohort study. These results support the use of the BRI as a screening tool for assessing stroke risk; yet, because cross-sectional studies have inherent limitations, more thorough research is required until the BRI has been consistently validated in additional independent cohorts.
https://www.strokejournal.org/article/S1052-3057(25)00022-9/fulltext
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Jimfife
#37
To all the other comments, I add:
From my perspective the elephant in the kitchen is what happens when the flow of blood sugar (carbs) into the circulation exceeds the combined rate at which it can be oxidized plus stored in liver and muscle glycogen. Insulin will also be high, and to help protect against hyperglycemia, the liver will begin de novo lippogenesis. And DNL appears to be a major source of serum saturated fat (higher than consumption of dietary saturated fat). Serum sat-fat somehow triggers TLR4 receptors (I don’t know if it in fat cells, or systemic), which is part of a large inflammatory network. The DNL sat-fat also leads to Cerimide sphingolipid production, which appears to disrupt the GLUT4 insulin cascade and drive insulin resistance.
Anyway, that’s all new to me, and I am less interested in who has the key insight to obesity and metabolic syndrome, than I am in figuring out what to do about it, and how to heal.
And it seems that elephant is the dietary oversupply of carbohydrate, relative to energy needs. And driving down the peak flux of glucose into the blood, as well as the overall average (AUC), seems to me to be of the first-order of importance in healing. When we stop the DNL, we can working on the metabolic machinery of it’s opposite, lipolysis. This is where we “go keto”. I mean ketosis as a metabolic state, not a diet plan. I’m agnostic as to the “carnivore”, “vegan”, or omnivore (like me). I do think that while a vegan may have a harder time getting enough protein without too much carbs and staying out of DNL, but then again, I’ll bet there’s not as many of them getting into this metabolic pickle to start with.
And, staying with the idea of metabolic recovery, see “Flipping the metabolic switch” ( see Obesity (Silver Spring). 2018 February ; 26(2): 254–268. doi:10.1002/oby.22065.)
I have found that when I eat/fast/do long endurance (fat burning) exercise/wait a couple hours more, and then let the protein and fat back in slowly, and then eat the rainbow salad-- that this Is a big-time workout and the next day I feel great. Ketosis, at least part time, as well as occasional long fasts seem like they really help remodel the metabolism.
I know there’s many other drivers of insulin resistance / hyperinsulinemia but I’m going to work on that elephant, first.
That’s my 2¢ worth, from the what am I gonna do about it perspective.
See also “Effects of Step-Wise Increases in Dietary
Carbohydrate on Circulating Saturated Fatty Acids and Palmitoleic Acid in Adults with Metabolic Syndrome”
and
Saturated Fats and Health:
A Reassessment and Proposal for
Food-Based Recommendations
JACC VOL. 76, NO. 7, 2020
AUGUST 18, 2020:844 – 5 7
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blsm
#38
Joseph,
I have 59 grams of visceral fat per my November 2024 dexa and I measured at 21.7% body fat that day (55 y/o menopausal F). My challenge is that I need to try to build a bit more muscle which will entail gaining some weight and of course part of that will unavoidably be fat. I’m getting into territory beyond me but just trying to stay active and eat well with a slight surplus in general and engage in progressive overload. Do any of your podcasts cover minimizing VF gain while building muscle by chance?
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Or, you know, drugs to the rescue 
. Starring role for SGLT2i. BG control is only one benefit, though obviously a key one.
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@blsm Yes. Several episodes address this topic directly while others indirectly. See below.
135 & 137 with Dr Loh (she’s a weight loss specialist)
147 with Dr Jackson focusing on gut health to reduce chronic inflammation as a pathway to improve metabolism.
102 with James Lavalle (no relation) about gut health…more info in support of Dr Jackson
144 with Dr Tarnopolsky about mitochondrial health and muscle. He’s a legend.
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blsm
#41
Oh wow, thank you! That should keep me busy. I remember listening to one of the Vivian Loh interviews.
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