The research team, led by Dr. Mark Larance, studied fat tissue located in different places to understand their role during every-other-day fasting.
Visceral (belly) fat is the fat tissue surrounding organs, including the stomach, while subcutaneous fat lies under the skin and is associated with better metabolic health. These two fat tissue types were found to undergo dramatic changes during intermittent fasting.
Larance, senior author, comments that though most people think that all fat tissue is the same, the location makes a big difference.
During fasting, fat tissue gets broken down by lipolysis and releases fatty acids to provide energy to the body. However, findings showed that during fasting, visceral fat became resistant to this release of fatty acids.
Visceral and subcutaneous fat were also found to have increased their ability to store energy as fat to rebuild the fat store before the next fasting period rapidly.
Dr. Larance explained that this could be because repeated fasting periods could have triggered a preservation signaling pathway in visceral fat.
“It means subcutaneous tissue is having to contribute more fatty acids. This type of adaptation may be the reason why visceral fat can be resistant to weight loss after long periods of dieting,” he adds.
He comments that since mouse physiology is similar to humans but with a much faster metabolism, it allowed them to observe changes more rapidly and examine tissues difficult to sample in humans.
Larance also points out that the findings may not apply to different diet regimes like the 5:2 diet or calorie restriction. The next step will investigate the effects of other types of intermittent fasting and different diets on human belly fat.
Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris, a nutrition scientist, who was not involved in the research, cautions about drawing too many conclusions from this study’s results.
She also points out the associated benefits of intermittent fasting – improved insulin and glucose responses.
Source: Medindia
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