That Beer Belly May Not Completely be Your (or Beer's) Fault

You see a lot of middle-aged men these days with that belly growing. Men who were great athletes in their younger years suddenly seem to be dropping their muscle and exchanging it for the pregnant look.

That ain’t no baby in your belly - it’s visceral fat. And it causes lots of problems. They even have a term for it - sarcopenic obesity. Fat goes up. Muscle goes down.

There’s a reason for that trend. It’s not just that these men are becoming lazy and eating junk.

In some experiments with ‘middle-aged’ male mice, they found that total body fat increased by 600% while lean body mass decreased by 23%.

Other studies have shown that between 20 and 70, men have a decrease in ‘fat-free mass’, otherwise known as muscle, of about 40%. At the same time, they have an increase in fat. After 70 both fat-free cells (muscle) and fat decrease at a parallel rate.

One of the reasons is that as men grow older, their bodies activate some dormant stem cells called Adipose Progenitor Cells (APCs) that turn into fat cells.

Beats me why the body would do this.

Something triggers the APC’s to activate and grow into fat cells. That something is increased signalling through a receptor called leukemia inhibitory factor receptor (LIFR) which signals a pathway in the cell called the STAT3 pathway.

The good news is that if you can quiet or silence this pathway, you can inhibit those stem cells from making you more of a fatty.

There are two natural compounds that can help quiet those pathways.

1. Capsaicin

2. Thymoquinone

Capsaicin is found in spicy peppers. The spicier the better. Thymoquinone is found in black seed oil derived from the Nigella sativa plant.

They have studies that these compounds do in fact help reduce visceral fat.

By the way, I found a lot of this information from Nick Norwitz’s Substack articles. I highly recommend them.

I don’t know about you, but neither very spicy peppers nor black seed oil are part of my regular diet.

So I headed over to Amazon to see if there were supplements that would suffice. Sure enough. There are supplements for both Capsaicin and Thymoquinone.

It sounds like those supplements can help. You know what can also help?

1. A really good diet

2. Periodic fasting

3. Resistance training to build muscle

4. High-intensity interval training (sprinting)

The traditional activities that everyone knows they should be doing (maybe everyone doesn’t know about the high-intensity stuff) but don’t always do.

Unfortunately as we age our motivation to do these activities decreases just as the need to do them more increases.

Not only do we have the problems with old again slowing us down and making us less motivated. Now it looks like our bodies are actually working to make it harder on us to stay lean and healthy.

All the more reason to fight harder!