CLA for Weight Loss?
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Conjugated Linoleic Acid for Weight Loss?
You asked us to evaluate the use of CLA for weight loss, so that’s today’s main feature!
First, what is CLA?
Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) is a fatty acid made by grazing animals. Humans don’t make it ourselves, and it’s not an essential nutrient.
Nevertheless, it’s a popular supplement, mostly sold as a fat-burning helper, and thus enjoyed by slimmers and bodybuilders alike.
❝CLA reduces bodyfat❞—True or False?
True! Contingently. Specifically, it will definitely clearly help in some cases. For example:
- This study found it doubled fat loss in chickens
- It significantly increased delipidation of white adipose tissue in these mice
- The mice in this study enjoyed a 43–88% reduction in (fatty) weight gain
- Over the course of a six-week weight-loss program, these mice got 70% more weight loss on CLA, compared to placebo
- In this study, pigs that took CLA on a high-calorie diet gained 50% less weight than those not taking CLA
- On a heart-unhealthy diet, these hamsters taking CLA gained much less white adipose tissue than their comrades not taking CLA
- Another study with pigs found that again, CLA supplementation resulted in much less weight gained
- These hamsters being fed a high-cholesterol diet found that those taking CLA ended up with a leaner body mass than those not taking CLA
- This study with mice found that CLA supplementation promoted fat loss and lean muscle gain
Did you notice a theme? It’s Animal Farm out there!
❝CLA reduces bodyfat in humans❞—True or False?
False—practically. Technically it appears to give non-significantly better results than placebo.
A comprehensive meta-analysis of 18 different studies (in which CLA was provided to humans in randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trials and in which body composition was assessed by using a validated technique) found that, on average, human CLA-takers lost…
Drumroll please…
00.00–00.05 kg per week. That’s between 0–50g per week. That’s less than two ounces. Put it this way: if you were to quickly drink an espresso before stepping on the scale, the weight of your very tiny coffee would cover your fat loss.
The reviewers concluded:
❝CLA produces a modest loss in body fat in humans❞
Modest indeed!
See for yourself: Efficacy of conjugated linoleic acid for reducing fat mass: a meta-analysis in humans
But what about long-term? Well, as it happens (and as did show up in the non-human animal studies too, by the way) CLA works best for the first four weeks or so, and then effects taper off.
Another review of longer-term randomized clinical trials (in humans) found that over the course of a year, CLA-takers enjoyed on average a 1.33kg total weight loss benefit over placebo—so that’s the equivalent of about 25g (0.8 oz) per week. We’re talking less than a shot glass now.
They concluded:
❝The evidence from RCTs does not convincingly show that CLA intake generates any clinically relevant effects on body composition on the long term❞
A couple of other studies we’ll quickly mention before closing this section:
- CLA supplementation does not affect waist circumference in humans (at all).
- Amongst obese women doing aerobic exercise, CLA supplementation has no effect (at all) on body fat reduction compared to placebo
What does work?
You may remember this headline from our “What’s happening in the health world” section a few days ago:
Research reveals self-monitoring behaviors and tracking tools key to long-term weight loss success
On which note, we’ve mentioned before, we’ll mention again, and maybe one of these days we’ll do a main feature on it, there’s a psychology-based app/service “Noom” that’s very personalizable and helps you reach your own health goals, whatever they might be, in a manner consistent with any lifestyle considerations you might want to give it.
Curious to give it a go? Check it out at Noom.com (you can get the app there too, if you want)
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Lies I Taught in Medical School – by Dr. Robert Lufkin
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There seems to be a pattern of doctors who practice medicine one way, get a serious disease personally, and then completely change their practice of medicine afterwards. This is one of those cases.
Dr. Lufkin here presents, on a chapter-by-chapter basis, the titularly promised “lies” or, in more legally compliant speak (as he acknowledges in his preface), flawed hypotheses that are generally taught as truths. In many cases, the “lie” is some manner of “xyz is normal and nothing to worry about”, and/or “there is nothing to be done about xyz; suck it up”.
The end result of the information is not complicated—enjoy a plants-forward whole foods low-carb diet to avoid metabolic diseases and all the other things to branch off from same (Dr. Lufkin makes a fair case for metabolic disease leading to a lot of secondary diseases that aren’t considered metabolic diseases per se). But, the journey there is actually important, as it answers a lot of questions that are much less commonly understood, and often not even especially talked-about, despite their great import and how they may affect health decisions beyond the dietary. Things like understanding the downsides of statins, or the statistical models that can be used to skew studies, per relative risk reduction and so forth.
Bottom line: this book gives the ins and outs of what can go right or wrong with metabolic health and why, and how to make sure you don’t sabotage your health through missing information.
Click here to check out Lies I Taught In Medical School, and arm yourself with knowledge!
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Cheeky diet soft drink getting you through the work day? Here’s what that may mean for your health
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Many people are drinking less sugary soft drink than in the past. This is a great win for public health, given the recognised risks of diets high in sugar-sweetened drinks.
But over time, intake of diet soft drinks has grown. In fact, it’s so high that these products are now regularly detected in wastewater.
So what does the research say about how your health is affected in the long term if you drink them often?
Breakingpic/Pexels What makes diet soft drinks sweet?
The World Health Organization (WHO) advises people “reduce their daily intake of free sugars to less than 10% of their total energy intake. A further reduction to below 5% or roughly 25 grams (six teaspoons) per day would provide additional health benefits.”
But most regular soft drinks contain a lot of sugar. A regular 335 millilitre can of original Coca-Cola contains at least seven teaspoons of added sugar.
Diet soft drinks are designed to taste similar to regular soft drinks but without the sugar. Instead of sugar, diet soft drinks contain artificial or natural sweeteners. The artificial sweeteners include aspartame, saccharin and sucralose. The natural sweeteners include stevia and monk fruit extract, which come from plant sources.
Many artificial sweeteners are much sweeter than sugar so less is needed to provide the same burst of sweetness.
Diet soft drinks are marketed as healthier alternatives to regular soft drinks, particularly for people who want to reduce their sugar intake or manage their weight.
But while surveys of Australian adults and adolescents show most people understand the benefits of reducing their sugar intake, they often aren’t as aware about how diet drinks may affect health more broadly.
Diet soft drinks contain artificial or natural sweeteners. Vintage Tone/Shutterstock What does the research say about aspartame?
The artificial sweeteners in soft drinks are considered safe for consumption by food authorities, including in the US and Australia. However, some researchers have raised concern about the long-term risks of consumption.
People who drink diet soft drinks regularly and often are more likely to develop certain metabolic conditions (such as diabetes and heart disease) than those who don’t drink diet soft drinks.
The link was found even after accounting for other dietary and lifestyle factors (such as physical activity).
In 2023, the WHO announced reports had found aspartame – the main sweetener used in diet soft drinks – was “possibly carcinogenic to humans” (carcinogenic means cancer-causing).
Importantly though, the report noted there is not enough current scientific evidence to be truly confident aspartame may increase the risk of cancer and emphasised it’s safe to consume occasionally.
Will diet soft drinks help manage weight?
Despite the word “diet” in the name, diet soft drinks are not strongly linked with weight management.
In 2022, the WHO conducted a systematic review (where researchers look at all available evidence on a topic) on whether the use of artificial sweeteners is beneficial for weight management.
Overall, the randomised controlled trials they looked at suggested slightly more weight loss in people who used artificial sweeteners.
But the observational studies (where no intervention occurs and participants are monitored over time) found people who consume high amounts of artificial sweeteners tended to have an increased risk of higher body mass index and a 76% increased likelihood of having obesity.
In other words, artificial sweeteners may not directly help manage weight over the long term. This resulted in the WHO advising artificial sweeteners should not be used to manage weight.
Studies in animals have suggested consuming high levels of artificial sweeteners can signal to the brain it is being starved of fuel, which can lead to more eating. However, the evidence for this happening in humans is still unproven.
You can’t go wrong with water. hurricanehank/Shutterstock What about inflammation and dental issues?
There is some early evidence artificial sweeteners may irritate the lining of the digestive system, causing inflammation and increasing the likelihood of diarrhoea, constipation, bloating and other symptoms often associated with irritable bowel syndrome. However, this study noted more research is needed.
High amounts of diet soft drinks have also been linked with liver disease, which is based on inflammation.
The consumption of diet soft drinks is also associated with dental erosion.
Many soft drinks contain phosphoric and citric acid, which can damage your tooth enamel and contribute to dental erosion.
Moderation is key
As with many aspects of nutrition, moderation is key with diet soft drinks.
Drinking diet soft drinks occasionally is unlikely to harm your health, but frequent or excessive intake may increase health risks in the longer term.
Plain water, infused water, sparkling water, herbal teas or milks remain the best options for hydration.
Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland and Emily Burch, Accredited Practising Dietitian and Lecturer, Southern Cross University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Never Enough – by Dr. Judith Grisel
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We’ve reviewed books about addiction before—specifically about alcohol, at least. This one’s more general in that it covers different addictions.
On the other hand, it’s also more specific, in that it covers them from the author’s field: neuroscience.
…and experience too. The author had a plethora of addictions (the serious kind), got sober, and then undertook to study neuroscience. Her hope was to help others avoid, or escape from the same as‚ what she went through.
Dr. Grisel (as she now is) takes a methodical approach in this book. She works her way through the addictive mechanisms of a broad selection of common drugs, explaining each.
The focus here is on neutral explanations, rather than the propagandizing scaremongering that failed at least one generation. Why each drug is alluring, what it really does do—and the neurological price it exacts, down to the molecular level.
She also covers risk factors for addiction; genetic, epigenetic, and environmental. There’s no “if you were stronger”, or “these people made bad choices”, so much as… Many addicts were, in effect, sabotaged from before birth.
That doesn’t mean that to become addicted or not is just fate, but it does mean… There but for the grace of factors completely outside of our control go we.
Why is this useful to us, be we a reader without any meaningful addiction (we’re not counting coffee etc here)? Well, as this book illustrates and explains, many of us could be one (more) mishap away from a crippling addiction and not know it. Forewarned is forearmed.
Bottom line: almost all of us are, have been, or will be touched by addiction in some way. Either directly, or a loved one, or a loved one’s loved one, or perhaps a parent who gave us an epigenetic misfortune. This book gives understanding that can help.
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Reduce Caffeine’s Impact on Kidneys
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝Avid coffee drinker so very interested in the results Also question Is there something that you could take or eat that would prevent the caffeine from stimulating the kidneys? I tried to drink decaf from morning to night not a good result! Thanks❞
That is a good question! The simple answer is “no” (but keep reading, because all is not lost)
There’s no way (that we yet know of) to proof the kidneys against the stimulating effect of caffeine. This is especially relevant because part of caffeine’s stimulating effect is noradrenergic, and that “ren” in the middle there? It’s about the kidneys. This is just because the adrenal gland is situated next to them (actually, it’s pretty much sitting on top of them), hence the name, but it does mean that the kidneys are about the hardest thing in the body to have not effected by caffeine.
However! The effects of caffeine in general can be softened a little with l-theanine (found in tea, or it can be taken as a supplement). It doesn’t stop it from working, but it makes the curve of the effect a little gentler, and so it can reduce some unwanted side effects.
You can read more about l-theanine here:
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SuperLife – by Darin Olien
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We mostly know more or less what we’re supposed to be doing, at least to a basic level, when it comes to diet and exercise. So why don’t we do it?
Where Darin Olien excels in this one is making healthy living—mostly the dietary aspects thereof—not just simple, but also easy.
He gives principles we can apply rather than having to memorize lots of information… And his “this will generally be better than that” format also means that the feeling is one of reducing harm, increasing benefits, without needing to get absolutist about anything. And that, too, makes healthy living easier.
The book also covers some areas that a lot of books of this genre don’t—such as blood oxygenation, and maintenance of healthy pH levels—and aspects such as those are elements that help this book to stand out too.
Don’t be put off and think this is a dry science textbook, though—it’s not. In fact, the tone is light and the style is easy-reading throughout.
Bottom line: if you want to take an easy, casual, but scientifically robust approach to tweaking your health for the better, this book will enable you to do that.
Click here to check out SuperLife and start upgrading your health!
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When Age Is A Flexible Number
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Aging, Counterclockwise!
In the late 1970s, Dr. Ellen Langer hypothesized that physical markers of aging could be affected by psychosomatic means.
Note: psychosomatic does not mean “it’s all in your head”.
Psychosomatic means “your body does what your brain tells it to do, for better or for worse”
She set about testing that, in what has been referred to since as…
The Counterclockwise Study
A small (n=16) sample of men in their late 70s and early 80s were recruited in what they were told was a study about reminiscing.
Back in the 1970s, it was still standard practice in the field of psychology to outright lie to participants (who in those days were called “subjects”), so this slight obfuscation was a much smaller ethical aberration than in some famous studies of the same era and earlier (cough cough Zimbardo cough Milgram cough).
Anyway, the participants were treated to a week in a 1950s-themed retreat, specifically 1959, a date twenty years prior to the experiment’s date in 1979. The environment was decorated and furnished authentically to the date, down to the food and the available magazines and TV/radio shows; period-typical clothing was also provided, and so forth.
- The control group were told to spend the time reminiscing about 1959
- The experimental group were told to pretend (and maintain the pretense, for the duration) that it really was 1959
The results? On many measures of aging, the experimental group participants became quantifiably younger:
❝The experimental group showed greater improvement in joint flexibility, finger length (their arthritis diminished and they were able to straighten their fingers more), and manual dexterity.
On intelligence tests, 63 percent of the experimental group improved their scores, compared with only 44 percent of the control group. There were also improvements in height, weight, gait, and posture.
Finally, we asked people unaware of the study’s purpose to compare photos taken of the participants at the end of the week with those submitted at the beginning of the study. These objective observers judged that all of the experimental participants looked noticeably younger at the end of the study.❞
Remember, this was after one week.
Her famous study was completed in 1979, and/but not published until eleven years later in 1990, with the innocuous title:
Higher stages of human development: Perspectives on adult growth
You can read about it much more accessibly, and in much more detail, in her book:
Counterclockwise: A Proven Way to Think Yourself Younger and Healthier – by Dr. Ellen Langer
We haven’t reviewed that particular book yet, so here’s Linda Graham’s review, that noted:
❝Langer cites other research that has made similar findings.
In one study, for instance, 650 people were surveyed about their attitudes on aging. Twenty years later, those with a positive attitude with regard to aging had lived seven years longer on average than those with a negative attitude to aging.
(By comparison, researchers estimate that we extend our lives by four years if we lower our blood pressure and reduce our cholesterol.)
In another study, participants read a list of negative words about aging; within 15 minutes, they were walking more slowly than they had before.❞
Read the review in full:
Aging in Reverse: A Review of Counterclockwise
The Counterclockwise study has been repeated since, and/but we are still waiting for the latest (exciting, much larger sample, 90 participants this time) study to be published. The research proposal describes the method in great detail, and you can read that with one click over on PubMed:
It was approved, and has now been completed (as of 2020), but the results have not been published yet; you can see the timeline of how that’s progressing over on ClinicalTrials.gov:
Clinical Trials | Ageing as a Mindset: A Counterclockwise Experiment to Rejuvenate Older Adults
Hopefully it’ll take less time than the eleven years it took for the original study, but in the meantime, there seems to be nothing to lose in doing a little “Citizen Science” for ourselves.
Maybe a week in a 20 years-ago themed resort (writer’s note: wow, that would only be 2004; that doesn’t feel right; it should surely be at least the 90s!) isn’t a viable option for you, but we’re willing to bet it’s possible to “microdose” on this method. Given that the original study lasted only a week, even just a themed date-night on a regular recurring basis seems like a great option to explore (if you’re not partnered then well, indulge yourself how best you see fit, in accord with the same premise; a date-night can be with yourself too!).
Just remember the most important take-away though:
Don’t accidentally put yourself in your own control group!
In other words, it’s critically important that for the duration of the exercise, you act and even think as though it is the appropriate date.
If you instead spend your time thinking “wow, I miss the [decade that does it for you]”, you will dodge the benefits, and potentially even make yourself feel (and thus, potentially, if the inverse hypothesis holds true, become) older.
This latter is not just our hypothesis by the way, there is an established potential for nocebo effect.
For example, the following study looked at how instructions given in clinical tests can be worded in a way that make people feel differently about their age, and impact the results of the mental and/or physical tests then administered:
❝Our results seem to suggest how manipulations by instructions appeared to be more largely used and capable of producing more clear performance variations on cognitive, memory, and physical tasks.
Age-related stereotypes showed potentially stronger effects when they are negative, implicit, and temporally closer to the test of performance. ❞
(and yes, that’s the same Dr. Francesco Pagnini whose name you saw atop the other study we cited above, with the 90 participants recreating the Counterclockwise study)
Want to know more about [the hard science of] psychosomatic health?
Check out Dr. Langer’s other book, which we reviewed recently:
The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health – by Dr. Ellen Langer
Enjoy!
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