Add muscle and remove fat....

Today's Post: Thursday, 6-9-2011

Half of Americans are too fat and most of the rest of us would like to be less fat.

Since muscle burns more calories than fat, if you have more muscle, you can eat more and still be trim.

Exercises such as strength training and interval cardio and vigorous or forceful activities people do tend to add muscle, burn calories while doing them, AND burn calories after you do them. They are also marvelously good for your health!

So, it has been quite clear for years that adding muscle is an effective way to lose excess fat. It makes losing fat doable without having eat too much less. That makes the fat loss from such exercise an effective way to keep the fat off!

So both doing the exercises and adding the muscle help with permanent fat loss!

A researcher has found that a substance in apple peels and other foods, ursolic acid, enables you to safely add even more muscle when you do these kinds of exercises. It may even help people who don’t or can’t exercise keep what muscle they have.

The even more surprising news is that it also reduces bodyfat well enough in addition that it may do so directly in addition the effect of the added muscle.

(Ursolic acid is thought to do this by making both growth hormone and insulin more effective. The lower blood levels of insulin from this would help explain the fat loss.)

The researcher who did the study, a Dr Christopher Adams, of the University of Iowa, examined the genetic changes that occur when muscles waste or atrophy.
After he evaluated 1,300 chemicals, for reasons not in the news stories, he decided to test ursolic acid as a way to trigger the expression of genes that would reverse this effect.

He then fed a normal diet for them to mice with small amounts of ursolic acid included as a supplement.

The muscles of the mice got bigger; and the mice got stronger. (He apparently had a way to test their grip strength.)

The mice fed ursolic acid had lower levels of cholesterol and other blood fats that tend to damage their hearts.

AND, they had around a third less body fat!

All the news stories on this study talk about apple peel as that is apparently the inexpensive food that the researcher used in the mice when he got this effect.

Apple peel is moderately high in ursolic acid. It’s apparently the substance or part of it that gives organic apple peel a waxy texture.

I’ve always thought that apple peel tasted like thin canvas so I’ve long preferred peeled apples and applesauce.

So it’s good news that this substance, ursolic acid, is available from many other foods and three kinds of supplements.

I’ve always liked the spice, sage. Ursolic acid is in sage in a high enough concentration that the one direct supplement for it is a sage extract.

( http://www.essense-of-life.com/moreinfo/specialtyproducts/S-201/Ursolic+Acid+Capsules.htm
Ursolic Acid Capsules $79.95 Sage Extract (75% Ursolic Acid) 100 capsules 58.5 mg / serving 33 servings)

Sage is also easy to grow. So if you like it enough to include in salads or other foods, you can get it for a lot less money.

What I cannot yet tell you is how much you need to take or eat to get this effect.

I hope to find out.

Dr Adams said that ursolic acid is particularly concentrated in apple peel but is also found in cranberries and prunes -- and in basil, oregano and thyme.

Wikipedia has this: "Ursolic acid is present in many plants, including apples, basil, bilberries, cranberries, elder flower, peppermint, rosemary, lavender, oregano, thyme, hawthorn, prunes."

That reveals that bilberry supplements and hawthorn supplements likely contain ursolic acid.

"Ursolic acid is.... also capable of inhibiting various types of cancer cells by inhibiting the STAT3 activation pathway[3][4] and human fibrosarcoma cells by reducing the expression of matrix metalloproteinase-9 by acting through the glucocorticoid receptor. As medicine, it is well tolerated.... "

That too is exciting news since cancer and cancer treatments can kill in part by causing people to lose muscle mass.

That means that ursolic acid may be an underused anticancer drug too.

If it can both slow the growth of cancer cells and keep the patient’s lean muscle mass intact, it may also be more important as an anticancer medicine than has been known before.

The other news is that it may work best by eating the foods that contain it. And you can go today to the store or health food store and buy the foods or bilberry or hawthorn supplements!

You can certainly make some interesting and spicy salads with these ingredients!

It may also give doctors something to prescribe to young men who overdo anabolic steroids that is safer and effective enough to keep them from losing all the new muscle that they want to keep. That way the young men will be more willing to give up the anabolic steroids to protect their health. And, they will suffer less of a crash and burn effect on their muscles than they would have experienced otherwise.

(Note that ursolic acid has been tested to work to build muscle and remove fat as a food supplement. I am unaware that the drug version of ursolic acid has been so tested. But I would certainly expect it to work when tested.)