Can you eat to
burn fat?
Mark Hyman, MD
Have you heard of visceral fat? This is no ordinary fat. This is a dangerous type of fat that surrounds your organs and fuels disease and obesity. You don’t even have to be overweight to be dealing with dangerous visceral fat. I see plenty of “skinny-fat” patients who are thin on the outside and fat on the inside or what I call, “TOFI.”
What fuels visceral fat?
It all comes down to insulin.
If we make too much insulin, it drives the fuel in our blood into our fat cells. Too much insulin also does a lot of other bad things like cause heart attacks, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and dementia.
When it comes to causing spikes of insulin that start this miserable chain reaction, not all calories are created equally. Sugar and refined carb calories are the culprits. Americans eat, on average, about 152 pounds of sugar and 146 pounds of flour a year (almost a pound of sugar and flour per person per day!). These are actually pharmacologic doses of sugar and flour!
So if we can eat to feed fat, can we eat to burn fat?
The answer is yes!
Food controls everything. Food affects the expression of your genes that cause or prevent disease. In other words, food literally turns on health genes or disease genes. It tells those genes to store or burn fat.
One of my favorite foods for fat burning is MCT oil, which stands for medium-chain triglycerides. They are a special type of fatty acid derived from coconut oil that acts as super fuel for your cells. MCT boosts fat burning and increases from the gut into the liver and isn’t stored as fat. Instead, it turns into energy.
How else can we burn fat? With protein.
Amino acids, the building blocks that form protein, send messages to areas in the brain that signal you are full. A higher protein diet can help you lower your waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio (one of the most important measurements in your body; it predicts heart disease, cancer, and death better than almost anything), and the dangerous intra-abdominal adipose tissue.
Higher fiber diets have also been connected to a lowered risk of belly fat. Soluble fiber, in particular, is the best for reducing belly fat. One of my favorite types of soluble fiber is acacia fiber which supports healthy blood sugar, cholesterol, and weight loss.
I’ve combined my favorite fat burning ingredients into one shake: The Pegan Shake
My new Pegan Shake combines MCT oil with a healthy dose of clean protein and acacia fiber to create a product that supports fat burning.
Of course, getting rid of dangerous belly fat requires a lifestyle approach, and a huge part of that approach is what you eat.