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17.11.2018

Does rooibos induce fat loss?

Drinking rooibos tea may help to prevent you from becoming fat, and may also make your weight loss attempts more successful. This suggests an in vitro study that South African diabetologists published in Phytomedicine. In a surprisingly low concentration, rooibos tea ingredients make it harder for fat cells to store nutrients like fat.

Rooibos
The scientific name for rooibos is Aspalathus linearis. Rooibos grows in South Africa, where the local population has been using extracts for centuries against skin irritations for centuries.

According to in vitro studies, rooibos may be able to heal wounds more quickly by activating the type of immune cell involved in healing processes. [Planta Med. 2018 Jul;84(9-10):645-52.] Rooibos strengthens the inflammatory processes triggered by interleukin 1-beta, with which immune cells clean up broken skin cells. [Molecules. 2016 Oct 2;21(10).]

The researchers made rooibos tea, and then extracted its ingredients. The 3 most important were iso-orientin, quercetin-3-orobinobioside and orientin.

According to dozens of in vitro studies there are twisted interesting substances in rooibos. For example, aspalathin and nothofagin protect the blood vessels against high glucose levels, and inhibit the immune cells that can damage the vessel walls under these conditions.[Inflammation. 2015 Feb;38(1):445-55.] Substances in rooibos may also prevent the insulin producing cells in the pancreas from dying by prolonged exposure to toxic glucose concentrations. [PLoS One. 2016 Jun 14;11(6):e0157604.]

Two other ingredients, luteolin and orientin, stimulate the build-up of bone tissue in test tubes. [Mol Nutr Food Res. 2015 Mar;59(3):443-53.] Phenylpropenoic acid glucoside [PPAG] and aspalathin have an antioxidant effect in laboratory animals and extend the life span. [Phytomedicine. 2013 Feb 15;20(3-4):380-6.]

There is not much research into the effects of rooibos on human research. An exception is the Swedish study that was published in Public Health Nutrition in 2010. In that research, rooibos tea emerged as an inhibitor of the ACE enzyme. [Public Health Nutr. 2010 May;13(5):730-7.] ACE inhibitors lower blood pressure.

Study
The South Africans exposed young fat cells to their rooibos extracts in test tubes, and then studied how the cells reacted.

Results
The exposure to rooibos extracts was not harmful to cells, not even in high concentrations. The extracts reduced the amount of stored fat in the fat cells by 22-15 percent.

Noteworthy is the relatively low concentration with which the researchers achieved the best results. This strongly suugests that these effects also occur in human rooibos users.

How rooibos thwarts the growth ambitions of fat cells, you can see above. Rooibos inhibits the production of PPAR-alpha and PPAR-gamma. You can consider these proteins as sensors for fat, which tell the fat cell that they are supplied with nutrients which they can store. Put simply, rooibos makes fat cells blind.

Conclusion
"Taken together, our results indicate that chronic rooibos consumption may have the potential to inhibit adipogenesis and thereby reduce adipocyte tissue mass expansion and also influence adipocyte metabolism in vivo", the South Africans summarize their findings.

"However, further work is needed to clarify the precise molecular mechanism through which rooibos exerts its anti-adipogenic effects."

"For example, the effect of rooibos on enzymes involved in fatty acid metabolism such as acetyl-CoA carboxylase, hormone sensitive lipase and adipose triglyceride lipase could be investigated. Additional investigations into the molecular mechanism(s) through which rooibos alleviates obesity-associated conditions such as hyperglycemia is also justified."

Source:
Phytomedicine. 2014 Jan 15;21(2):109-17.

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