The Surprising Place Fat Can Accumulate To Shrink Your Brain

Popular belief: body fat is bad for the health

Counterpoint: body fat is necessary for health

Nuance: not all fat is created equal, and nor does it stay that way depending on where it goes

Let’s get metabolical

Fat (in the human body) has several purposes, including:

• Store energy for use later
• Provide thermal insulation
• Provide physical padding against injury

That latter may seem trivial, by the way, but it’s really not. Aside from subcutaneous fat cushioning certain parts of us in visible ways, the much-maligned fat of our viscera is important too, for it helps prevent damage to our organs—until we get too much of it, and then it can cause its own problems, which we wrote about here:

Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It

Another place fat can get stored that’s not ideal is the liver. This tends to happen when our glucose metabolism gets overloaded, and the body has to start stuffing glycogen wherever it can, and the result is overtaxing the liver, and that’s what happens in the case of what what used to be called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and is now called metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD).

Attentive readers may have noticed that there appears to be a D missing from the acronym. We noticed that too, and were not able to find any explanation of why it’s not MDASLD.

However, you can read about why the change was made, and how the decision was agreed upon, here: A multisociety Delphi consensus statement on new fatty liver disease nomenclature

Anyway, whatever we want to call it, it’s a problem, and we wrote a practical guide to fixing it, here: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

Further, when it comes to even just subcutaneous fat (i.e. the kind that lives just under your skin, that you can squish, unlike visceral fat or hepatic fat, which you can’t. Or if you can, then you have bigger problems, such your abdomen being open), there are some places it can go that are healthier than others.

For what’s best and worst in that regard, see: How To Make Your Body Fat Heart-Healthier

And, for that matter: Can We Do Fat Redistribution?

Sometimes, it’s the type of fat that makes a difference!

See: The BAT-pause! ← the title here refers to the production of highly beneficial brown adipose tissue (BAT) slowing down during the menopause, if we’re not careful—but there are things we can do to convert white adipose tissue to yellow and brown.

Sometimes, it isn’t!

See: The Fat That Fuels Alzheimer’s Disease

And today, it’s…

Pancreatic fat

No surprises that this should be an issue (the pancreas is where insulin is made, after all, unless you have Type 1 Diabetes, anyway), but it’s not much talked-about, and not well-known.

Recently, researchers (Dr. Miao Yu et al.) examined whether where fat is stored in your body matters for brain health more than overall weight or BMI, and their analysis used MRI and health data from 25,997 participants in the UK Biobank.

What they found, in few words, is that two previously unrecognized fat distribution patterns were most strongly linked to brain shrinkage, faster brain aging, cognitive decline, and higher neurological disease risk.

One of them was the well-known “skinny fat” pattern: this profile affects people who don’t appear fat, but carry a high proportion of fat relative to muscle, with fat tending to accumulate in the abdomen. There’s a lot of cross-over with what we talked about above, in terms of visceral fat, and also waist-centric subcutaneous fat distribution.

The other was pancreatic-predominant fat: this pattern involves unusually high fat in the pancreas, often without high liver fat, and showed particularly strong associations with negative brain outcomes. For example, people in this group had about 30% fat in the pancreas, which is two to three times higher than most other fat patterns, and up to six times higher than in lean people.

Which is a problem, because pancreatic fat appears to pose a greater neurological risk than fatty liver, but it’s often overlooked in routine imaging.

In the words of one of the researchers, Dr. Kai Liu,

❝From the perspectives of brain structure, cognitive impairment and neurological disease risk, increased pancreatic fat should be recognized as a potentially higher-risk imaging phenotype than fatty liver.❞

You can read the paper in full, here: Association of Body Fat Distribution Patterns at MRI with Brain Structure, Cognition, and Neurologic Diseases

Want to learn more?

Check out:

Why We Get Sick – by Dr. Benjamin Bikman ← this is about insulin resistance as the driver of much disease, long before blood sugar management becomes an issue, and this has pancreatic health at its core.

Take care!