There is fat and there is belly fat. Most people think that the two are one and the same, but they are not. Fat on your hips and tush and fat on your chest and arms are energy storage depots for times when you do not have a regular food supply. In a healthy person this storage of energy is dipped into every night as the number of hours from dinner to breakfast is long enough to use up the little bit of sugar energy stored in the liver as glycogen to feed the brain and organs. Some time during the night the body has to switch over to burning stored fats for energy – if you are healthy. Most people in America are not metabolically healthy no matter how good they may look on the outside.
When I talk about belly fat, I am not talking that “pinch an inch” at the level of the belly button. The stuff you can pinch is like the hip fat – storage for energy. Belly fat refers to visceral fat, fat that packs in around your innards. Fat that accumulates around your intestines, liver, pancreas, spleen, and colon is a very different critter than what is termed subcutaneous fat; the fat under your skin. Visceral fat or belly fat gives you that beer belly look that makes you look like you have swallowed a watermelon. It is not surface jiggly stuff, but is deep inside and stretches your abdominal skin tight – kind of like being pregnant.
Unlike the lazy subcutaneous fat that simply parks the excess calories we eat as fat deposits, visceral fat is very active biologically. This fat produces loads of inflammatory messengers called cytokines. These chemicals put your body’s immune system into hyperactivity. Cytokines are naturally produced in healthy people when they are injured or get sick. They are released by damaged cells to tell your immune system to build up and prepare to fight off disease. Cytokines are responsible for that achy sick feeling you get when you are sick. Pain meds, like ibuprofen, specifically block the formation of one type of these cytokines.
So why would we develop a bunch of little inflammation fat factories in our gut?
This speaks to the heart of the mater with belly fat. The secret is that the belly is reacting to being attacked. The medical community is just beginning to connect the dots with belly fat formation, but the general understanding is not there yet. The studies released over the last few years are pointing to belly fat as a major contributor to brain inflammation/dementia, heart disease, diabetes, liver disease, the list goes on and on. So if it is so bad, why is the body creating it? The answer is that belly fat is really the alarm bell sounding off for the real enemy – foreign proteins and bacteria getting into the body from the gut.
Doctors get it that cytokine production occurs normally if you get a cut in your skin or pick up a pneumonia bug. In those cases bacteria are able to enter the body through damage in the barriers to the outside world; our outer skin and the inner skin that is the lining of our lungs. Well we have four major barrier systems that serve to keep our insides away from the outside world – our outer skin, our lung lining, our gut lining, and our blood-brain barrier.
Here is the ah-ha moment – the cytokine flood being produced by our visceral fat is because our gut lining barrier system has been breached. Bad things are getting into us through our gut lining. These bad things are being picked up by the lymphatic and blood vessels in the gut area, which also bathe the visceral fat cells. These cells are the alarm sentries, and they are screaming “alert” to the immune system.
A healthy body has a small number of these cells to stand guard and call alert after the occasional food poisoning. They do a good job ramping up the immune system to fight off any invaders from a gut infection. But what happens when the food poisoning is every day for years and years? This is the impact of the modern western diet. We chronically live in a state of mild food poisoning.
“What poisons?” I hear you ask. Aside from the thousands of poisonous chemicals we add to our foods to make them stay looking fresh long after any normal food would have spoiled, the biggest offenders are polyunsaturated fats and sugars. I will say it flat out – any time you eat a food that has been cooked in vegetable oil it is poisonous. Heating vegetable oils always turns them rancid, and rancid equals poisonous. Rancid oils kill gut-lining cells and punch holes in the gut lining. Alcohol does the same thing for those of you that drink. Even though the holes are very tiny, they are huge compared to the size of the 500+ different kinds of bacteria in our guts. They are no different than a cut on your skin at letting bacteria into our body.
Sugar is evil in a different way. It directly damages tissues throughout the body once it gets into our blood stream. That is why diabetes is so bad for us. But in the gut sugar acts like super grow fertilizer for a bunch of the bad critters inside our gut and suppresses the good guy bacteria. It would be like putting weed food on your front lawn while spraying grass killer at the same time. Pretty quickly your front lawn is full of weeds. The bad guy weeds in our gut dig their roots into our gut lining and choke the life out of the protective gut lining cells. Those cans of Coke and Pepsi, along with all the sweet foods, are weed fertilizer in our guts.
The holes in the gut lining let protein fragments from bacteria called lipopolysaccharides and undigested food proteins into the lymph and blood systems. These travel through the body wreaking havoc and training the body to attack its own tissues. They glue themselves onto our normal body tissues making them look like something else – something foreign that the immune system then tries to eliminate.
This situation is called leaky gut. Chronic leaky gut triggers the visceral fat cells to produce cytokines to get the immune system to hurry down to the gut to stop the spread of dangerous lipopolysaccharides and other proteins. With each new meal creating more and more trouble, the cells start to multiply figuring they need to yell the alarm louder by making more cells to sound the alarm. Your belly swells with these new fat cells as well as the fluid accumulation caused by inflammation and immune system overload. In short order you now have a big belly. If your waist size is not 20% narrower than your hip size or is over 36 inches for men or 30 inches for women, you have gut inflammation. This process is happening in you.
When the gut barrier is compromised, in fairly short order the blood brain barrier also becomes compromised. The brain then becomes vulnerable to all sorts of degenerative and inflammatory conditions. Although this is a bad thing, we can do a simple test for blood brain barrier compromise. If it is positive, then we are also positive we have a compromised gut barrier. The test is called a GABA challenge. We can do blood tests for the gut barrier issues that can tell us just how progressed the problem is, but I like to do this simple screening test first. GABA is a neurotransmitter formed inside your brain that helps you calm down – it quiets the
mind. It is too big a molecule to cross a healthy blood brain barrier, but it can cross a badly damaged barrier. So if you take GABA orally and feel it calming you down, then we know for certain that your blood brain barrier is damaged, and by inference know your gut lining is damaged.
I have written in previous articles about the necessary dietary changes to heal the gut lining so I won’t discuss that today. But I would like to offer you an opportunity to do a GABA challenge, free of charge, to see if your brain and gut are obviously compromised. Come by the office and pick up two capsules of GABA (or buy your own if you are not in the area.) One hour before bedtime take 1 capsule and wait 15 minutes and see how you feel. If you don’t feel anything take the second one and again, see how you feel. If you feel the GABA relaxing you, then we know there is trouble in paradise. Some people simply fall asleep and feel the GABA affecting them the next day by making them slow down and feel unmotivated. The possibility of falling asleep is why I have you test when you are about ready for bed.
Belly fat is dangerous, meaning it is a big red flag that bad things are happening in your gut. The trouble is slow to come on and usually is not felt for a long time, not until secondary symptoms show up like reflux, colitis, diabetes, and so on. But it can be successfully addressed and healed. That means major lifestyle changes are in order. Nobody likes to change their
lifestyle, but sometimes it is a must if you want to avoid going over the cliff.