PUFA for Fat Gain (1)
- Lachy M
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Figure 1 above has been lifted from Shen et al, 2014. The fire in a bottle blog talks a lot about the PhD of Valerie Reeves however, this paper intrigues me far more then Valerie's. The reason for this is the amount of stearic acid used. Reeves used a diet where 40% of calories came from stearic acid to achieve a lean phenotype. Shen et al, 2014 uses 20% of the diet as fat and only 17% as stearic acid a much lower level which is able to achieve a great result.
Figure 2 the average caloric intake of the animals also revealed an interesting result. The diet that was able to consume the most calories was the stearic acid diet. The diet that consumed the least was the low fat diet. Yet when you analyse those 2 diets in figure 1 stearic acid mice had a lower total body fat % compare to the low fat diet which had some of the highest levels of fat.
The body composition results expressed that the lean mass was also affected heavily by the diet composition with stearic acid diets containing the greatest percentage of lean mass. But, when consulting the graph on body weight they found no significant differences between any of the diets.
Therefore I propose possible reasons for this result:
1- Stearic Acid acts to prevent the build up of primarily visceral fat and secondarily subcutaneous fat.
2- PUFA works to limit the building of lean tissue. The low level found in the stearic acid diet compared to the others could explain the higher lean mass level which kept the mice the same weight. lean mass generation requires more calories than the growth of adipose tissue.
Over the following weeks I will be looking to see if there is any evidence that PUFA downregulates the processes of lean mass building. Otherwise so far the ideas of Brad and Petro seem to fit what we see in terms of PUFA but I still do not entirely agree just yet that the metabolic boost comes from the mitochondria operating better.
The diets utilised are as quoted below:
"Animals were divided randomly into four groups of 10 mice each, and were placed on one of four diets: a low fat diet (5% corn oil diet) comparable to normal rodent chow, a 20% safflower oil diet, a 17% corn oil/3% safflower oil diet and a 17% stearic acid/3% safflower oil diet. The stearic acid-rich diet used in these studies contained a minimum amount of essential fatty acids required for normal growth and development, and dietary stearic acid as the primary fatty acid. This diet minimizes the confounding effects of other fatty acids while not affecting total body weight [13], [14]. These diets were prepared by Harlan-Teklad (Madison, WI) and details have been published [13]."
To give you an idea of what we are looking at comparing safflower oil is as follows
References:
Shen MC, Zhao X, Siegal GP, Desmond R, Hardy RW. Dietary stearic acid leads to a reduction of visceral adipose tissue in athymic nude mice. PLoS One. 2014 Sep 15;9(9):e104083. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0104083. PMID: 25222131; PMCID: PMC4164353.
Deliorman Orhan D, Pekacar S, Ulutaş OK, Özüpek B, Sümmeoğlu D, Berkkan A. Assessment of Commercially Safflower Oils (Carthami Oleum Raffinatum) in Terms of European Pharmacopoeia Criteria and Their Weight Control Potentials. Turk J Pharm Sci. 2022 Jun 27;19(3):273-279. doi: 10.4274/tjps.galenos.2021.84484. PMID: 35775241; PMCID: PMC9254086.
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