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26.08.2024

Phlorizin | A slimming aid in unripe apples

A heavy intake of phlorizin, a substance in unripe apples, may promote fat loss. This is suggested by a somewhat older animal study, which we happened to come across today.

Study
In 2016, Chinese pharmacologists at Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine published an animal study in which they gave fattened mice an oral dose of phlorizineevery day for 14 weeks. If the mice had been adult humans, they would have been given a capsule containing approximately 400-600 milligrams of phlorizine daily.

That is more than people consume through their regular diet. Phlorizine is found in apples, applesauce and apple juice. Unripe apples in particular contain a lot of phlorizin.

You can see the chemical structure of phlorizin here.

In 2020, Swiss researchers calculated in the British Journal of Nutrition that the average intake of phlorizin fluctuates between 0.7 and 7 milligrams per day. For people who eat an unusually large number of apples, this can amount to up to 52 milligrams per day. [Br J Nutr. 2020 Apr 28;123(8):942-50.] The most heavily dosed supplements we know provide approximately 30-40 milligrams of phlorizin per recommended daily intake.

Phlorizin inhibits the absorption of glucose in the small intestine and increases the excretion of glucose through the urine. In animal studies, phlorizin has an anti-diabetic effect. [Mol Biol Rep. 2012 May;39(5):5299-306.]

The researchers used three control groups. There was a group of mice that had not been fattened and were not given any special substances, a group of fattened mice that were also not given any active substances and a group of fattened mice that were given the statin simvastatin. We will ignore the effects of this for the moment.

Results
Supplementation with phlorizin could not make the fattened mice as slim as the mice that had not been fattened. However, phlorizin was able to halve the fat mass in their abdomen.

When the researchers placed their test animals in a room at 4 degrees Celsius, they could see that phlorizin activated the brown fatty tissues of the mice to release more heat. They only saw that effect in fattened animals, not in normal-weight mice.

If you want to put it more precisely, fattening would have caused the mice's brown fatty tissues to release less heat. Supplementation with phlorizin reversed that process.

Useful for people?
Healthy mice have more brown fat cells than normal people. All kinds of substances that increase calorie consumption in normal mice via brown fat cells have little effect in humans.

But on the other hand, the fattened mice on which the Chinese pharmacologists conducted their experiments are very similar to us in terms of their brown fat cells. And if phlorizine got their brown fat cells working again, perhaps phlorizin will do the same for us - whether or not in combination with supplementation with another fat browning agent, such as green tea, white tea or caffeine.

Source:
Journal of Functional Foods. 2016;27:429-38.

More:
Animal study: weight loss a cinch with apple pulp 03.10.2013

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