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20.03.2015

Animal study: acerola inhibits growth of fat tissue

Bodybuilders are always on the look out for strategies that will help minimise the growth of fat reserves while they're on a high-calorie diet. An animal study done by researchers at the Universidade Estadual Paulista in Brazil suggests that taking an acerola supplement might be one such strategy. And you might not even need that much of it.

Acerola
The acerola is a kind of cherry that grows on the tropical bush called Malpighia emarginata. Acerola is packed with vitamin C, but also contains carotenoids, gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and polyphenols, which are what have given acerola superfood status for a couple of decades.

In most of the shops and webstores that sell acerola youll find supplements that contain extracts of the fruit, but the Brazilians used different kinds of juice for their experiment: ordinary industrially produced juice [IND], juice made from unripe acerolas [UNR] and juice made from ripe acerolas [RIP].

Study
The Brazilians fattened mice for 13 weeks, giving them a diet that included junk food [CAF]. One group of mice was given a standard diet, and this was used as the control group.

If you fatten animals they get inflammations in their fatty tissue, which speed up the growth of their fat reserves even more. The Brazilians wanted to know whether acerola supplementation would help reduce this, so they gave the lab animals 10 ml acerola juice per kg bodyweight daily.

The human equivalent of this dose, based on an adult weighing 80 kg, would be 80 ml per day. That's a couple of shot glasses.

Results
At the end of the 13 weeks the mice that had been given junk food but no acerola weighed significantly more than the other lab animals.

The Brazilians worked out an adiposity index based on the weight of the epididymal, mesenteric and retroperiotoneal adipose tissues. The index was very high in the mice that had been fattened, but acerola supplementation almost halved the increase.

Acerola supplementation reduced the increase of the amount of TNF-alpha in the fat tissue. TNF-Alpha is an inflammatory factor that inhibits the effect of insulin.

Mechanism
The acerola supplementation caused the fat cells to start producing more toll-like receptor-4. Via this receptor fat cells activate the immune system, thus ensuring that there are immune cells to clear away dead fat cells.

The Brazilians suspect that acerola helps the immune system to do its work better via toll-like receptor-4, and that as a result the production of obesity inducing signal molecules such as TNF-alpha increases by less.

Conclusion
"Future studies are needed to better understand the mechanisms involved in the beneficial effects associated with acerola juice intake, especially in mice fed a cafeteria high-fat diet", the researchers wrote.

Source:
Lipids Health Dis. 2014 Feb 4;13:24.

More:
GABA: body fat inhibitor and insulin booster 30.12.2014
Piceatannol's body recompositioning effect 27.08.2013

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