LifeCare Chiropractic

The Best Chiropractic Care in Mesa, Arizona

Abdominal Obesity

Are You Carrying Around an Extra Organ? 3 Things to Know

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Your ancestors didn’t have it, and yet there’s a good chance you do. Most of your organs work in your favor, but this one is your enemy.

Much like some disconnected appendage transplanted in place of your severed hand that came from a serial killer, your abdominal fat is trying to kill you.  I have written about abdominal fat as a renegade organ in a previous blog article that can be read by clicking here.  Before we get into the “guts” of this blog post, we need a little review of adipose hormones.

While the abdominal fat tissue produces a number of compounds, there are 3 main hormones that come from our abdominal fat cells that we are currently aware of.  Here’s a brief summary:

  1. Leptin – helps to maintain an even body weight.  Lose abdominal fat and lower leptin stimulates appetite, gain fat and higher leptin levels make you less hungry.  Unfortunately, with abuse, our brains become resistant to leptin, and higher levels no longer shut down our appetite.
  2. Resistin – levels increase as the amount of abdominal fat increases and increases inflammation, insulin resistance and drives the progression to diabetes.
  3. Adiponectin – an anti-diabetic hormone that is produced less and less as we gather more abdominal fat.

When were are healthy, these adipokines help to keep your body weight in balance.  However, as you start to collect more abdominal fat over time, these adipokines shift from a friendly distribution to a disease-causing one.  This then produces more inflammation which, in turn, produces even more body fat.  Quite the downhill spiral.

This particular study looks more closely at the actions of adiponectin in mice and how it relates to blood flow within the abdominal fat region.  Here’s what researchers found:

  • Higher levels of adiponectin led to a more blood flow within the fat tissue (which leads to “happier” fat cells with more blood flow and nutrients).
  • Mice that produced more adiponectin had an almost complete shut down of inflammation measured by macrophage (WBC) infiltration and had no crown-like structures (these structures occur when dead fat cells clump together around macrophages that are trying to clean up the dying tissues).
  • Mice that produced more adiponectin had a strong sensitivity to insulin and reduced likelihood of developing fatty liver.

You can see that, once you begin to accumulate abdominal fat your body begins to revolt against you, stacking the cards against you for losing and maintaining weight loss.  Obviously, prevention is much easier than a cure, but for most of us, that train long ago left the station.  We can, however, make sure that our children are not put into a similar situation by making sure they never tip over into a state of increased abdominal obesity.

I also have to put a plug in here for non-invasive laser liposuction, which we have had in our office for almost a year now.  While the manufacturers and most clinics that own the units continue to promote that laser “opens pores in the fat cells,” there is strong evidence that laser applied to the abdominal region is doing what we know that cold laser does: increasing blood flow and lowering inflammation.

What a perfect combination for abdominal fat that is both starved for blood flow and inflamed.  This explanation for the benefits of laser lipo makes sense.

Abdominal Fat Measurements = Heart Fat

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There is nothing good about visceral fat.  Many just worry about the aesthetics of it, but the reality is that visceral fat wreaks havoc on long term health.

The current model of visceral adipose tissue puts this type of fat as its own organ system.  The only problem is that this organ system, instead of working with your body, is an invader trying to survive.

Here’s how it goes:

  • Fat has always been a storage tissue for extra calories.
  • Lord knows we got enough of these in today’s society.
  • The fat begins to accumulate.
  • For awhile this is ok, but past a certain point these fat cells begin to run out of an adequate blood supply.

After all, these cells need nutrients just like every other cell, but there is only so much blood flow to go around.  Once the fat cells don’t have the nutrients they need, they get pissed off.  Pissed off fat cells begin to generate pissed off hormones called adipokines that drive inflammation and damage elsewhere in the body.

This is how visceral fat leads to poor blood vessel health (heart attack, stroke, dementia) and other problems like cancer.

While we generally think of fat accumulated around the abdominal region, it also accumulates around other organs like the heart, termed epicardial fat.  The problem with epicardial fat is that it is so close to the heart that the hormones released can have a greater effect.  The way we usually look for epicardial fat is through an echocardiogram, but this isn’t exactly practical for routine use.  Enter this particular study.

Researchers looked at whether we could use the sagittal abdominal diameter as an indirect marker for epidcardial fat without the hassle of an echocardiogram.  The sagittal abdominal diameter is measured by a set of calipers, measuring the distance from the small of the back to near the belly button region while lying down.

The findings in this study suggest that measuring the sagittal abdominal diameter is a pretty darn good way to indirectly measure the amount of fat surrounding your heart.

I found this study pleasantly rewarding since our office recent implemented the use of a “laser liposuction” unit (you can read more about this service by clicking here).  I realized quickly that the patients seeing the most dramatic results were the ones with the most inflammatory belly fat.  Since laser has been known for many years to increase blood flow and decrease inflammation, this makes complete sense.

Using laser to calm down inflammatory body fat, according to this study, is also highly likely to lower the fat accumulated around your heart as well.  Not a bad bang for your buck.