Fat Burners Don't Work in the Obese!? BAT Activity Almost Zero, Even after the Ingestion of ~290mg Ephedrine!

Do thermogenic fat burners only work if you already look like this? I mean, what would be the sure, then and why did the ECA stack work for overweight people, as well?

I don't know if you have ever thought about the problems mostly involuntarily obese individuals are facing in their everyday lives!? Even if you discard the constant bullying and the subliminal messages they receive from their peers, not fitting into a regular seat in an airplane certainly is more than just an embarrassment. Now what would you say, if I told you that they are discriminated against even, when they shop at their local GNC, or whichever other supplement vendor they may be using? And I am not talking about the lean guys and girls on the labels of the supplements, here! No, I am referring to a discrimination that takes place on a more fundamental level and it happens right in front of the shelf with every overweight person's favorite supplements: The so-called fat burners!

Ok, now that I got everyone's attention, I guess its about time to break the news: Fat burners don't burn fat!

If this does not happen to be your first visit, here, at the SuppVersity you may now be asking yourself how an (unfortunately still not so) common wisdom like this could make it into the news... right? Well, the answer is simple: In addition to the fact that the active fat burning effects of almost all thermogenics are negligible, so that they can - if anything - support your nutritional weight loss efforts by making it easier for you to stick to your diet and training regimen, a recent study by Carey et al. suggests that the minimal effects they do actually have diminish with each pound of superfluous body fat you are carrying around (Carey. 2012).

"Hold on! 2.5mg/kg ephedrine? That's 170mg and 287.5mg ephedrine. That's madness!" Usually I would say "yeah, you are right", but based on previous studies (Nedergaard . 2011), Carey et al. knew that 1.0mg/kg did not elicit any BAT activity, despite significant physiological adrenergic responses (blood pressure and heart rate; cf. Astrup. 1985a,b). I still don't have to tell you not to "try that at home" - and this is more than just a "parenteral advisory" ;-)

In a randomized, double-blinded, crossover trial, the Australian researchers administered 2.5 mg/kg of ephedrine to nine lean (BMI 22±1 kg/m²) and nine obese (BMI 36±1 kg/m²) young men and measured the thermogenic response of their "fat burning" brown adipose tissue (note: BAT burns glucose as well and the activity of the latter is usually measured by [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose, which can be detected via PET-CT imaging).

Figure 1: PET-CT scan of lean (left) and obese (right) individual (Carey. 2012)

As the images in figure 1 clearly shows the actual BAT activity (located in the neck, where humans carry almost all their BAT; cf. Zingaretti. 2009), which has long been hailed as the underlying reason of the real-world effects the administration of ephedrine HCL, ephedra or mua huang, was far from earth-shaking and by no means comparable to what you would expect based on the almost legendary status of ephedrine as "the most potent thermogenic" that ever hit the market.

Keep in mind: There are also inter-individual differences in the amount of BAT people have. Still the differences between lean and obese were so pronounced that you can hardly argue that the results of the study were mere coincidence.

What is even more striking than the overall magnitude of BAT activity the scientists observed is however that the latterw was more or less completely absent in the obese individuals -- and that despite the fact that I am honestly wondering none of them collapsed after ingesting his 287mg of ephedrine (remember the dosages were scaled according to body weight!). When you think about it, the scientists subsequent conclusion that they have...

"[...] demonstrated for the first time that BAT can be activated in the majority of lean, but not in obese humans with a single dose of ephedrine" (Carey. 2012)

could in fact have far reaching consequences that are not simply restricted to the use of respective dietary supplements, but extend into the realms of the development of future anti-obesity drugs and the use and usefulness of "alternative" obesity "treatments", such as cold exposure, as well.The latter for example may be a more potent activator of BAT activity than ephedrine, but it's falling short, when it comes to the centrally mediated effects, of which it is now becoming increasingly clear that they and not the insignificant BAT activity must be responsible for the indisputable real-world weight loss effects, both, lean and overweight individuals, have seen in the past, when they consumed much lower doses of ephedrine, than the subjects in the study at hand.

Figure 2: BAT activity, nor-adrenaline response, changes in systolic (SBP) and diastolic (DBP) blood pressure in response to 2.5mg/kg body weight ephedrine in lean and obese subjects (data based on Carey. 2012)

If we also take into account that ephedrine is probably still one the most potent inducers of BAT activity among the (formerly) OTC thermogenics and most currently available (and recently banned) ingredients are nothing but central nervous system stimulants, the scientists' remark that their "data highlight[s] the poor responsiveness of BAT to systemic adrenergic stimulation compared with that of the cardiovascular system", should actually make it pretty obvious why so many of the purported (and in some cases even factual) thermogenics don't deliver the "fat burning" results their consumers are expecting: At the moment they start to work, the cardiovascular side-effects are already in the "danger zone", so that anything but a negligible increase in thermogeneisis is rare in the lean and - as the study at hand would suggest - probably totally absent in the average obese diet pill junkie.

Thermogenics won't work for you, but you can work with them... not infinitely, though! 

You can't light the candle from both sides and still expect it to last forever. Stims and meditation are like Jing and Jang, and you got to master them both (read more about how meditation can increase telomere length by 50%).

That many of these products do still work and that they do so even in the obese, as long as they are willing to accept that these products are adjuvants to and not replacements for a sound nutrition and exercise regimen, is thus probably more of a result of their ability to keep you training and dieting longer and harder, than due to any real "thermogenenic" effect. That said, I guess, I don't have to tell you that you cannot light the candle from both sides and expect to last it forever, do I?

Oh, I see, ... I would first have to to tell you what that's supposed to mean, right?! Well, basically it means that unless you want to make the acquaintance of "adrenal fatigue", "central fatigue syndrome" and the "athlete's triad", you better restrict the use of respective products to short time periods of max. 4-6 weeks and make sure not to (ab-)use them to simply ignore the physical necessity of rest and recovery! Believe it, or not, both of them are equally, if not more important, when you are trying to get ripped, as they are, when you are trying to get buffed.

References:

• Astrup A, Lundsgaard C, Madsen J, Christensen NJ. En-hanced thermogenic responsiveness during chronic ephedrine treatment in man. Am J Clin Nutr. 1985a; 42:83–94
• Astrup A, Bulow J, Madsen J, Christensen NJ. Contribution of BAT and skeletal muscle to thermogenesis induced by ephedrine in man. Am J Physiol. 1985b; 248:E507–E515
• Carey AL, Formosa MF, Van Every B, Bertovic D, Eikelis N, Lambert GW, Kalff V, Duffy SJ, Cherk MH, Kingwell BA. Ephedrine activates brown adipose tissue in lean but not obese humans. Diabetologia. 2012 Oct 13.
• Nedergaard J, Bengtsson T, Cannon B. New powers of brown fat: fighting the metabolic syndrome. Cell Metab. 2011 Mar 2;13(3):238-40.
• Vosselman MJ, van der Lans AA, Brans B, Wierts R, van Baak MA, Schrauwen P, Lichtenbelt WD. Systemic β-Adrenergic Stimulation of Thermogenesis Is Not Accompanied by Brown Adipose Tissue Activity in Humans. Diabetes. 2012 Aug 7.
• Zingaretti MC, Crosta F, Vitali A et al. The presence of UCP1 demonstrates that metabolically active adipose tissue in the neck of adult humans truly represents brown adipose tissue. FASEB J, 2009; 23:3113–3120.

Jump Squats 80% Type-II Fiber Activity, Cold Thermogenesis Better Fasted, Tuned Swiss Ball Crunch, 5-HTP vs. Asthma, HIIT Before Strength & High vs. Low GI Meal Pre Workout

Image 1: Few of the things the average trainee does in places that call themselves "fitness studios" has little to do have will actually promote fitness, as in being athletic. "Mr. check out my biceps", for example would be similarly lost ding this as the sedentary computer nerd "Mr. biceps" loves to laugh about.

I know from time to time I am not 100% in time when it comes to delivering promised articles, but after an exhaustingly hot day, I am pretty much in-time with the 2nd installment of "On Short Notice" for today and the third for this weekend. Since I felt that it looked awkward to have three posts with the "On Short Notice" in front posted one after the other, I did however decide to ditch that (at least for today) and get straight down to ... well, "business" with posts on the revealing type II fiber specific muscle-damage from jump squats, the reason why you better sit in your ice-tub fasted if you want to practice cold thermogenesis, the superiority of Swiss Ball Crunches with resistance bands over the classic ab machine, the surprising anti-asthmatic effects of super high doses of 5-HTP, the way women benefit equally from a progressive strength training regimen with or without HIIT or steady state cardio before the strength workout, and, lastly, the futility of fretting about the acute effects of high vs. low GI meals before a workout and how that relates to childhood obesity. And while I do, believe it or not, have material for at least another episode, I am not going to bore you with even more short news pieces for this weekend. Don't worry ;-)

• Plyometrics for type II muscle fiber(-damage) It probably depends on your individual take on the usefulness of muscle damage, if the headline to this "On Short Notice" got you excited about plyometric training or not. When I am now telling you that the participants in the recently conducted trial by Macaluso et al. were previously untrained (N=8; age = 22 ± 1 years, height = 179.2 ± 6.4 cm, weight = 78.9 ± 5.9 kg) and the creatine kinase levels (a marker of muscle damage and the subsequent leakage of the creatine kinase enzyme into the blood) peaked at only 529.0 ± 317.8 U/L (that's high, but way below the 1,000er range you often see in untrained subjects after nothing but a couple of eccentric biceps curls being performed to failure) after the exercise intervention, I'd guess that most of you will appreciate that the researchers observed significantly more severely damaged type II than type I fibers (on average 85% vs. 27% of the respective fiber type).

  

  Image 2: The effect of plyomtetrics on your fitness & physique is still  underrated by the most fitness enthusiasts; and that despite the facts that plyos are the bread and butter of many athletes whose physical feats they are admiring.

  If we now make the reasonable assumption that the ~60% higher rate of muscle damage in both the glycolytic and oxidative subtypes of the type II fibers was indicative of the fact that they were the ones which shouldered the main workload of the 10 x 10 jump squat regimen the young men had to perform, this is unquestionable good news for everyone trying to get big and buffed. After all, these fibers, which are also known as type IIa (86% severely damaged) and type IIx fibers (84.% severely damaged vs. just 27% of type I fibers), are the ones that allow bodybuilders to get lean and muscular - not just one or the other... if that got you intrigued about what plyometrics are and if there is more research on it, I suggest you take a(nother) look at my previous posts on "ploys", such as "Building the Jack-of-All-Traits Legs Workout With Squats, Jump Squats and Body Weight Plyometrics?" or even the "Turbo-Fire vs. Insanity ShootOut" from one of the previous installments of "On Short Notice".
• Cold thermogenesis is not for everyone, but if it works for you, better do it fasted! That the amount and in many cases even the presence of the metabolically active brown adipose tissue and with it the thermogenic response to cold exposure is a very individual thing, is something you, as a diligent SuppVersity student will be aware of after all you have already read my previous post of the matter (cf. "Cold Thermogenesis vs. Ephedra").

  

  Figure 1: Cold thermogenesis in postprandial (PP) vs. fasted state (FF); dark areas indicate high 18F-FDG uptake (=high metabolic activity; Vrieze. 2012)

  Since there are still way too many people who actually seem to believe that sitting in a cold bathtub for a couple of minutes everyday would be all it takes to get you ripped and jacked, I thought it prudent to give them the chance to make it actually work and advice them to do it fasted! According to a recently published study from the Department of Internal Medicine at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands (Vrieze. 2012), the metabolic activity of the brown fat in all 6/10 of the 10 healthy, lean male volunteers (18-32 y; body mass index, 20-24 kg/m²) who participated in the study was about twice as high when they sat in a room which was cooled down to 16-18°C for 2h fasted (13.1 g/mL glucose uptake) vs. in the postprandial state (6.8 g/mL).
  Aside from the usual non-responders (40%) and the huge heterogenity with respect to the thermogenic response (6.1 - 27.6g/L), which are typical for these experiments there is a similarly large intra-individual difference with respect to the increase in BAT activity in the fasted state with the highest responder going from 11g/L in the post-prandial to 27.6g/L in the fasted state and the "fasting non responder" with a statistically non-existent (the term "non-significant" would not be bold enough ;-) "increase" in cold induced thermogenesis from 5g/L to 6g/L.

• 

  Video 1 (askthetrainer.com): The Swiss ball crunch with resistance bands takes some "tweaking" to be done correctly. After all you usually don't have the equipment set up in the way you would need it at your gym (click image to watch).

  Swiss ball crunch with resistance bands effective and saver than ab machine While I am not sure how "effective" the ab-machine in the study by Sundstrup et al. actually was, I can tell you that done with resistance bands the allegedly hilariously looking swiss ball crunch is not just at least as effective in recruiting the musculature of the rectus abdominus (104±3.8 vs 84±3.8% nEMG, respectively) as one of those machines, where your legs are locked in a way that the rectus femoris will do take do way too much of the work (2x more activity than in the swiss ball crunch with resistance bands) and you thus set yourself up for future lower back (=lumbar pain).
  Against that background and in view of the fact that Sundstrup et al. found that "both men and women, younger and elderly, and individuals with and without pain benefitted equally from the exercises" (Sundstrup. 2012), it is probably well worth taking the 2-3 min to get the equipment in position and do 3-4 sets of this unquestionably unconventional exercise (check out the SuppVersity EMG Series and my post on "Integrated Core Exercises For 6-Pack Abs" for additional ab exercises).
• 

  A couple of statistics on the current asthma rates in the US
  

  • asthmatic adults: 18.7 million (8.2%)
  • asthmatic children: 7.0 million (9.4%)

  In 2010, most U.S. children aged 17 years and under had excellent or very good health (82%). However, 8% of children had no health insurance coverage, and 5% of children had no usual place of health care. Seven percent of children had unmet dental need because their families could not afford dental care. Fourteen percent of children had ever been diagnosed with asthma. An estimated 8% of children aged 3–17 years had a learning disability, and an estimated 8% of children had ADHD. (Bloom. 2011; based on data from 2010)
  5-HTP switches allergic asthma off No good news for the average Olympian athlete who would then lose his script for his beta-agonists (clenbuterol & co, see also SuppVersity Facebook news from Aug 01, 2012), but probably something those of you who suffer from allergic rhinitis or full-blown asthma will appreciate: The administration of 5-hydroxy-tryptophan an orally available precursor to serotonin over the course of  led to a profound reduction (70-90%!) reduction in allergic lung inflammation in a rodent model (Abdala-Valencia. 2012). While the supplement left all sorts of side-effect related parameters unchanged and did not lead to weight gain, which is an often touted side effect of SSRIs - mostly unjustly, by the way! - the hilariously high dosage of 5mg 5-HTP per kg body weight the rodents received did reduce the allergen-induced transglutaminase 2 (TG2) expression, the migration of immune cells into the lung tissue, the local synthesis of serotonin and the subsequent serotonylation of proteins (serotonin conjugation of proteins) which is a key feature of allergic asthma.
  Regardless of the fact that Abdala-Valencia explicitly point out that these effects "occured without systemic increases in serotonin" (Abdala-Valencia. 2012), which could have led to vasoconstriction and other negative side-effects, I strongly caution against the ingestion of a whole bottle of 5-HTP tabs per day... when the researchers from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine publish a follow up study on humans, I'll let you know, though - in view of the ever-increasing asthma (see infobox on the right) research in this area could not just offer a valuable new treatment strategy, but also insights into the underlying reasons of this epidemic.
• Young women can combine strength training with either steady state or HIIT and still make progress - Somewhat related to my post earlier this week on doing cardio before instead of after your strength workout are the results of a recent study by Silva et al. who found that young women (age ~23y) make identical strength gains, regardless of whether and which type (HIIT sprinting or steady state cardio on the cycle ergometer or classic jogging) they perform before with their twice a week full-body training (Silva. 2012). Just as in the Di Blasio study, the "cardio" sessions, which were performed in a 1 min all-out vs. 1 min active recovery (HIIT) or 95% of the ventilatory threshold (SST) fashion for 20-30min (progressing from 20-30 over the course of the 11 weeks), were performed before the weight training (note: changes in body composition were not evaluated in detail, but I would be very surprised, if the concomitant training regimen, and in that specifically the HIIT protocol, did not outperform the resistance training only protocol in this respect).

  

  Image 3 (rippedfitness.com): You will certainly remember Wednesday's news on doing cardio before weights, well, here you have more evidence that even doing 20-30 min of HIIT won't hamper the gains of fit female beginners on a twice a week full-body regimen with built-in progression regimen - neither will steady state cardio "in the zone", by the way.

  If you are a young, fit woman (or man) without years of competitive athletics under your belt and don't train all too often (~2-3 times per week), it does thus obviously not harm your strength gains on a classic strength training program with built in linear progression from 15-18RM to 8-10RM, if you concomitantly work on your conditioning - whether the results would be identical if the subjects were not just fit and healthy but had been training for years and were working out 5x instead of 2x a week, is yet questionable. On the other hand, it is very unlikely that seasoned athletes (and this goes out to the gentlemen, in particular) will lose muscle and ruin their strength gains, whenever they move further than the bench to the squat rack - it's all a matter of total volume and running out of puff due to bad conditioning can just as well keep you from pulling those additional 10kg off the floor as the exhaustion from doing too much cardio.
  This, by the way, brings me back to the notion of "fitness" vs. "being fit", I alluded to in the caption of image 1, already: If you want to exploit the 100 year credit your genes have granted you (see "Exercise for Life Extension" in today's first installment of "On Short Notice"), you better focus on "being fit". Try different things and don't get stuck in a rut.
• High GI, low GI, ... f*** GI! When you, a healthy, more or less well-conditioned individual are about to engage in a high intensity exercise protocol that simulates a football match (bouts of walking (31-39 s), jogging (41-46 s), cruising (41-45 s), sprinting (16-21 s) and standing), it make absolutely no difference whether you ingest a high (=80) or low (=44) pre-workout meal (total energy=377 kcal; CHO=79 g; Fat=3 g; Protein=13 g) 3.5h before your workout (Hulton. 2012).

  

  Image 4: Add Lucozade + Akash rice for high GI (80) or apple juice and basmati for low GI (44) and you have two isocaloric test pre-workout meals

  That's at least what the results of a recent study by Hulton et al. which did not find any differences in blood glucose, fatty acids (FA), glycerol, β-hydroxybutyrate, lactate and insulin (assessed before, during, and after the exercise bout), rates of CHO and fat oxidation (determined at 4 time points during the protocol) or 1 km time trial performance. It should be mentioned, though, that this was not a liquid meal, but consisted of either Lucozade + akash rice (high GI) or apple juice + basmati rice (low GI) with an identical chicken breast + tomato sauce "base" and identical macro-nutrient and calorie content.
  That the long-term consequences on your body composition may still be different is a different cattle of fish though and how "beneficial" liquid sugar, ah... I mean energy drinks, such as Lucozade are is something at least those of you who read my "Fat Content Per Energy Drink 0g, Body Fat Gain Per Energy Drink 18g!" post from June 30, 2012. Whether apple juice is much better is still debatable, though. Wojcicki & Heyman, for example, argue (finally, as I would like to add) in their latest paper that "excessive fruit juice consumption is associated with increased risk for obesity" and the ingestion of "sucrose [...]without the corresponding fiber, as is commonly present in fruit juice, is associated with the metabolic syndrome, liver injury, and obesity". Reason enough for the two pediatrics from the University of California to recommend that the "US Department of Agriculture's Child and Adult Food Care Program, which manages the meal patterns in childcare centers such as Head Start, promote the elimination of fruit juice in favor of whole fruit for children." (Wojcicki. 2012)

Before I eventually call it a week, I would like to remind everyone of the daily mini-news on the SuppVersity Facebook wall. Only few of them will also make it into the "On Short Notice" column (actually the "Exercise for Life Extension" in today's first installment was an exception), so that even the few of you who don't suffer acute short news withdrawal symptoms, may want to stop by from time to time ;-)

References

• Abdala-Valencia H, Berdnikovs S, McCary CA, Urick D, Mahadevia R, Marchese ME, Swartz K, Wright L, Mutlu GM, Cook-Mills JM. Inhibition of Allergic Inflammation  by Supplementation with 5-hydroxytryptophan. Am J Physiol Lung Cell Mol Physiol. 2012 Jul 27.  
• Bloom B, Cohen RA, Freeman G. Division of Health Interview Statistics Summary Health Statistics for U.S. Children: National Health Interview Survey, 2010. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Health Statistics. Hyattsville, Maryland December 2011. DHHS Publication No. (PHS) 2012–1578.
• Hulton AT, Gregson W, Maclaren D, Doran DA. Effects of GI Meals on Intermittent Exercise. Int J Sports Med. 2012 Jun 15.
• Macaluso F, Isaacs AW, Myburgh KH. Preferential Type II Muscle Fiber Damage From Plyometric Exercise. J Athl Train. 2012;47(4):414-20.
• Silva RF, Cadore EL, Kothe G, Guedes M, Alberton CL, Pinto SS, Pinto RS, Trindade G, Kruel LF. Concurrent training with different aerobic exercises. Int J Sports Med. 2012 Aug;33(8):627-34. Epub 2012 May 4.
• Sundstrup E, Jakobsen MD, Andersen CH, Jay K, Andersen LL. Swiss ball abdominal crunch with added elastic resistance is an effective alternative to training machines. Int J Sports Phys Ther. 2012 Aug;7(4):372-80.
• Vrieze A, Schopman JE, Admiraal WM, Soeters MR, Nieuwdorp M, Verberne HJ, Holleman F. Fasting and Postprandial Activity of Brown Adipose Tissue in Healthy Men. J Nucl Med. 2012 Jul 31. 
• Wojcicki JM, Heyman MB. Reducing childhood obesity by eliminating 100% fruit juice. Am J Public Health. 2012 Sep;102(9):1630-3. Epub 2012 Jul 19.

Fat Burning Grains? Japanese Study Says: The Peppery "Grains of Paradise" Actually Qualify as True Thermogenics

If you are as cool as the subject on the right (no black dots in the neck and trap area = no BAT activity) you don't have to keep thinking about BAT thermogenesis (img from Sugita.2013)

"Grains are the root of all our problems." It would be nice if it really were that simple... what would be even better is if they turned out to be the solution, as well. Wouldn't that be paradise?

It would. And what's more, it could! At least if the Grains of Paradise, i.e. the seeds of Aframomum melegueta(Rosco) K. Schum.) (GP), Guinea pepper or Alligator pepper would increase thermogenesis a significant amount more than those ~6kcal/h that have been observed in healthy non-obese subjects in a recent study by Jun Sugita and his (or her?) colleagues from the Department of Nutrition at the School of Nursing and Nutrition of the Tenshi Collage in Japan (Sugita. 2013).
.
~6 kcal/h in BAT positive subjects that's definitely not enough

The mechanism by which the ingestion of the ginger relative to its high content of pungent, aromatic ketones such as 6-paradol, 6-gingerol and 6-shogaol increased the resting energy expenditure in the nineteen healthy male volunteers aged 20 – 32 years was via an increase in the thermogenic activity in the brown adipose tissue of those 12 of 19 subjects who had been identified in a previous cold-exposure test to carry a significant amount of metabolically active brown fat. 

Figure 1: Effects of 40mg of grains of paradise extract on resting energy expenditure - absolute change in kcal (left) and time course of energy expenditure after the ingestion (right) in responders (BAT+) and non-responders (BAT-; cf. Sugita. 2013)

As you can see in figure 1, the effect was small and in the subjects without significant brown fat activity the 40mg of the GP extract had the exact opposite effects. Thus I am not willing to agree with the scientists who conclude that their results would

"[...] suggest that GP extract, like capsaicin and capsinoids, may be a potential tool for increasing BAT thermogenesis and decreasing body fat."

As a standalone ingredient, it is not going to do anything and the efficacy of true "thermogenics" (I am not talking about CNS activators, like ephedrine, here) as fat burners has a long history of lab results that don't carry from rodent models to human reality - even if the subjects don't compensate for the extra energy expenditure.

Histidine as a fat loss adjuvant? Laughable? Not for the obese! For lean folks like her? (learn more)

The reason for the repeated failure is simple: Rodents are no little men and unlike us, they are totally reliant on their ability to use metabolically active brown fat to generate heat and keep themselves warm. Intelligent and lazy as we are, we have come up with more than enough means to keep ourselves warm in the course of our evolutionary history not to be in need of this special fat. And the little amount of brown adipose tissue we have when we are born actually atrophies during the first years of our life. Any fat burner that works primarily by increasing the uncoupling proteins and thus the heat production in said tissue is thus not likely to produce visible results. This is the case for the lean and especially for the obese who happen to have even less brown adipose tissue than those of us, who don't schlep ourselves from the sofa to the fridge and back, sweating like crazy.

---

Bottom line: These "fake grains" are not going to solve the problems that are partly brought about by their "real" counterparts (i.e. the "healthy grains" in our diet ;-), but that is probably not going to hinder any snake oil vendor to putting it into his latest fat burning supplement. And who knows, when it's called "... grains", even Dr Oz may jump onto this paradise bandwagon. Why? Because there are enough people who'd rather waste thousands of dollars on false promises than spend a couple of bucks and a few hours of their TV time on a gym membership and the purchase and preparation of healthy whole foods.

References: 

• Sugita J, Yoneshiro T, Hatano T, Aita S, Ikemoto T, Uchiwa H, Iwanaga T, Kameya T, Kawai Y, Saito M. Grains of paradise (Aframomum melegueta) extract activates brown adipose tissue and increases whole-body energy expenditure in men. Br J Nutr. 2013 Aug;110(4):733-8.

Capsaicin - 2.56mg to Keep Your Metabolism Running on a Diet. Cold Thermogenesis - 5°C for 6kcal/h. Mobile Phones - 0.853 W/kg Pulsed EMR to Mess Up Neurotransmitters

You don't have to worry, the "guidelines" do not require you to perform either your 150 minutes of moderate cardio, or your 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic activity, and not even your two weekly full-body workouts in these shorts.

24% that's the SuppVersity Figure of the Week and it is actually not so low as I would have expected it to be, after all those 24% describe the ratio of US adults who meet the Physical Activity Guidelines for muscle-strengthening physical activity. Which guideline? Ah, you are the US guys and gals, so you should know that you are advised to

"perform muscle-strengthening activities that are moderate or high intensity and involve all major muscle groups on 2 or more days a week, because these activities provide additional health benefit" (2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans)

Additional benefit? Well, it goes without saying that the 150 minutes of moderate aerobic training and the reduction of salt, as well as the use of healthy vegetable oils are the primary object for every 'true American'.

Not That Hot: Cold Thermogenesis

Figure 1: An avg. effect size of 6kcal/h, non-responders + "negative-responders"; it doesn't work for those past the 30y mark - how on earth is cold thermogenesis going to help us solve the obesity pandemic?

(Chen. 2013) In a single-blind, randomized crossover intervention 24 volunteers (14 men, 10 women) were exposed to a 5°C temperature reduction (from 24°C to 19°C). During that treatment they wre sitting in a whole-room indirect calorimeter to measure their energy expenditure and lay in a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner afterwards (results, see image to the right).

Now, based on previous SuppVersity articles on the matter, you'll know that it is not exactly easy to find people who actually harbor a "significant" (and in this case this means "any at all") amount of metabolically active brown adipose tissue to get the thermogenesis going.

And with 23cm³ and 35cm³ for the men and women participating in the study at hand, the amount of the "good fat" they were carrying around is still pretty stingy. No wonder ...

• there was no thermogenic response in the male participants, but a
• 10% increase in energy expenditure in the female participants

I already see your eyes glow in the cold, ladies, but you crow too soon - those 10% were 6kcal/h, I repeat in full words "six additional calories per hour". Or roughly as much energy as a single set of body weight squats would be burning .

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If you are looking to shed 18% fat in 21 days, increase your health and your physical appearance, turn up the heat during your workouts, clean up your diet and don't move into the fridge (learn more)!

Bottom line: Against the background that there were neither significant changes in the hormonal profile (thyroid, adrenal, etc.) and considering the fact that the effect declined with age and was hardly measurable for 5 and negative (=lower energy expenditure in the cold) for 4 subjects, I stick to previous assessment: cold thermogenesis as a means of "expending more energy to get rid", is about as stupid as the whole concept of expending more energy to lose fat and it certainly does not, as the scientists state "represent a novel environmental strategy in obesity treatment".

If you want a "environmental strategy in obesity treatment", ban all the junkfood, switch off the elevators, hand out bikes and increase the health insurance cost for everyone who refuses to get his or her ass off the couch on a regular bases. Zealous? Unrealistic? Yeah, it is - but not more unrealistic than the hilarious notion that cooling the overweight majority of the inhabitants of the Western Obesity Belt down by 5°C would solve the obesity problem.

Mobile phones mess with neurotransmitter levels

Andreassen et al. have already developed a "Facebook Addiction Scale" and found that Facebook junkies tend to be

neurotic and extraverted, but lack a reasonable amount of conscientiousness (Andreassen. 2012)

(Aboul Ezz. 2013) I am well aware that many of you don't want to hear this and will discard the results researchers from the Cairo University present in their latest paper in the European Review forMedical and Pharmacological Sciences as "just another worthless rodent study" and I freely admit, you may be right.

It is well possible that rodents are more susceptible to the pulsed electromagnetic radiation from mobile phones than humans are, but I gather you will have to agree that the chance that there are still residual effects in human beings is by no means zero... and based on my personal observations, I would even argue that you see certain abnormalities in mobile phone junkies, already. Ok, those could have psychological and behavioral roots, but ...

Before I digress even further into the abyss of the "I cannot live without my mobile" virus that has already befallen many of my real world students, let's rather take a look at the outcome of Aboul Ezz et al.'s latest experiment.

Table 1: While the first six are actually the TOP (=low SAR) phones that are currently on the market, the others are random picks of mine from the data on SARdatabase.com

In the course of the latter, the scientists exposed a group of adult rats to the pulsed electromagnetic radiation of a mobile phone having a power density of 0.02W/cm² and an average specific absorption rate (the notorious SAR-value) of 0.843W/kg for 1h/day (that happens to be a little less of what your neat iPhone5 is pumping into your brain day in and day out) and measured the monoamine levels after one, two and four months, as well as on a follow-up one month after the last exposure and found:

The exposure to EMR resulted in significant changes in DA [dopamine], NE [norepenephrine] and 5-HT [serotinine levels] in the four selected areas of adult rat brain" (Aboul Ezz. 2013)

And the Egyptian researchers add, these chance could well explain the adverse effects that have been reported in conjunction with chronic "low level" exposure to pulsed electromagnetic radiation, which are usually related to memory problems and chronic stress.

What they don't mention in the abstract though is that the changes were not really consistent. It appeared as if there was some cyclicity involved with an initial increase in 5HT, a concomittant decrease in dopamine a newly established "balance" between the two leading to an increase in norepinephrine (=chronic stress) in months four.

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Bottom line: That being said, I can only repeat that even in the absence of direct physiological effects of the EMR exposure, the constant state of "being available" to whoever wants to reach you, as well as the addictive potential of being in contact with all your (often fake) facebook friends alone should be reason enough to re-evaluate your own mobile phone use.

Capsaicin keeps fatty acid oxidation & total energy expenditure up, when you're dieting

No this is not Liza Oz after taking Mehmet's beloved RK supplements - and it is not one of the subjects from the "Kitchen Sink Approach to Fat Loss study"... although, who knows? (learn more about that study)

(Janssens. 2013) Right from the Department of Human Biology, School for Nutrition, Toxicology and Metabolism (NUTRIM) at the Maastricht University in The Netherlands comes a new study that confirms that capsaicin a long-touted "fat burner" and anti-obesity agent  that's also turning up your heat, when you consume hot peppers, will maintain your energy balance and fatty oxidation rates in the normal zone, when you are dieting.

The 15 healthy Caucasian subjects underwent four 36 h sessions in a respiration chamber, which allowed the scientists to accurately measure their energy expenditure, the ratio of glucose / fat oxidation and blood pressure after receiving a dose of 2.56mg (1.03g of red chili pepper worth 39,050 Scoville heat units (SHU)) with every meal.

Now, this wouldn’t be something we have not seen in previous studies, already. With the study at hand, however, the capsaicin intake, was not the only controlled variable. In addition to simply checking what happens, when you consume one serving of capsaicin with each meal, the scientists also assessed the influence of the baseline energy intake of the subjects, with them being randomly assigned to receive adequate amounts of energy (= 100% of the daily energy requirements), or a calorically reduced diet (=75% of the daily energy requirements) during the tests.
 
The first noteworthy observation the scientists made is the adaptiation induced amelioration of the energy deficit. Contrary to what the simply calories in vs. calories out equation would suggest, the participants who received 25% less energy than they would need ended up having an effective energy deficit of only 20.5% - in other words, the missing 4.5% were simply conserved by the dreaded metabolic downregulation that’s one of the most important reasons for weight loss plateaus.

Figure 2: Changes in energy expenditure at rest, during sleep in response to food intake and activity, as well as substrate oxidation in 15 healthy Caucasian subjects (seven women, eight men) during the supplemented (CAP) and non-supplemented (PLA) energy sufficient (100) and restricted (75) conditions (Janssens. 2013).

Now this is where the capsaicin comes into play, as the results of the study at hand clearly demonstrate, the additional provision of 2.56 mg of the hot spice with every meal can negate the reduction in diet-induced thermogenesis and restore the lowered sleeping metabolic rate the 25% caloric reduction has brought about.

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Suggested read for those looking to stacking different ingredients to propel their weight loss efforts: "Forgotten Dieting Aids: Choline, Carnitine, Caffeine and the Anti-Weight-Loss Plateau Effects of Sugar and Phosphates" (read more)

Bottom line: In view of the fact that the capsaicin supplement also increased the fat oxidation during both the calorically reduced and the normal dieting conditions, it may in fact be that we've hot a pretty "hot" fat burner here... unfortunately, just with any other "fat burner", you still got to give your body the chance to actually burn the fat. Without sweat and a slightly reduced energy intake (25% does by the way make a good rule of thumb) this is yet not going to work.

Moreover, it is also questionable, whether the effects will be that noticeable after 1-2 weeks of chronic usage. I'd bet money they will either disappear completely or be drastically reduced, but that would be the topic for another study ;-)

All that's left are... *drumrolls* the Facebook news and an awesome weekend!

You know what's coming now, right? Correct, first I will enumerate a couple of Facebook News you may or may not have seen on the SuppVersity Timline (ha! I did not write "wall", am I now going to be rewarded, Mark Zuckerberg?)

• SuppVersity Highly Suggested Read - Part II of Sean Casey's summary of the ISSN conference | read more...
• Science for Science Sake - In the current scientific environment many scientists turn to biased reporting, intrinsically flawed study design & the like to produce "break through" results that are at best irrelevant, in the worst case threaten the live of participants in follow up studies | learn more... 
• Moderate Drinking Probably Lacks Life-Extending Effects - Sociologists argue: The lifestyle and not the booze of moderate drinkers is what prolongs their lives | learn more...
• Barefoot Running is Good for Your Knees: Take your shoes off to reduce patellofemoral joint stress during running | read more ...
• Can Supplements Precipitate Headaches? At least in a recent study from China the researchers observed correlations between isoflavone-supps in men and B-complex, vitamin C and green algae supplements in women | read more...

And afterwards I am telling you to have a nice weekend and reminding you of the fact that Sunday is no "off day" here at the SuppVersity ... although, for many of you it appears to be, which is why I am actually thinking about dropping the Sunday posts completely. Whatever... enjoy your weekend!

References:

• Aboul Ezz HS, Khadrawy YA, Ahmed NA, Radwan NM, El Bakry MM. The effect of pulsed electromagnetic radiation from mobile phone on the levels of monoamine neurotransmitters in four different areas of rat brain. Eur Rev Med Pharmacol Sci. 2013 Jul;17(13):1782-8.
• Andreassen CS, Torsheim T, Brunborg GS, Pallesen S. Development of a Facebook
  Addiction Scale. Psychol Rep. 2012 Apr;110(2):501-17.
• Chen KY, Brychta RJ, Linderman JD, Smith S, Courville A, Dieckmann W, Herscovitch P, Millo CM, Remaley A, Lee P, Celi FS. Brown fat activation mediates cold-induced thermogenesis in adult humans in response to a mild decrease in ambient temperature. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2013 Jul;98(7):E1218-23. 
• Janssens PL, Hursel R, Martens EA, Westerterp-Plantenga MS. Acute effects of capsaicin on energy expenditure and fat oxidation in negative energy balance. PLoS One. 2013 Jul 2;8(7):e67786.
   

Cold Thermogenesis - A Safe Ephedra Alternative? 70kcal Increase in 24h Energy Expenditure is Negligible, 50% Lower Than Ephedrine, Not Likely to Occur Obese or Older People

Image 1 (odditycentral): Jin Songhao, one of China’s most seasoned icemen and not exactly as lean as you may expect based on what you currently read around the blogosphere, managed to beat the previous world record for the longest ice bath - 120min! Congrats, Jin!

Ephedrine for years the go-to OTC fat burner for physique athletes and average Joe's and Jane's alike is no longer (officially) available: No matter how bold the label claims about X mg of "ephedra extract" may be - NONE(!) of the currently available "ephedra based" over-the-counter (OTC) fat-burners contains significant amounts of the active alkaloids, which made the old Mua huang based herbal ephedra products so effective. Against that background, dieters are constantly on the look-out for novel "gimmicks" to help them finally get rid of those annoying love-handles. One of those gimmicks, which has caught quite some attention as of late, is called "cold thermogenesis" and revolves around the idea that our bodies should consume more energy to keep a normal body temperature in a cold, compared to a normal temperature environment.

How is that different from a "thermogenic fat burner"

The most obvious difference between cold thermogenesis and "thermogenic fat burners" is actually so straight forward that I hardly dare stating that the former is induced by exposing yourself to low(er than normal) temperatures, while the promise of the latter is that the various ingredients of currently or formerly available OTC "fat burners" will induce a thermogenic response, irrespective of the current ambient temperature.

Figure 1: Antropomorphic data of the study participants (Cypess. 2012)

The results of a recently published study from the the Boston Harvard Medical School does yet provide somewhat more sophisticated insights into the differences between cold exposure and a sympathomimetic (i.e. an activator of the sympathetic nervous system), such as ephedrine. On three separate, independent study visits that took place in random order the ten healthy volunteers (age 27.1 years) who participated in the study (see figure 1 for DEXA based anthropometric data) and had been fasting since 12am the day before were exposed to one of the following "stimuli":

• ephedrine - a single intramuscular dose of 1mg/kg ephedrine
• saline control - an equal volume of saline
• cold exposure - in a surgeon’s cooling vest (Polar Products) w/ water temperature 14 °C

60min after the injection of ephedrine, saline, or the initiation of cold exposure, the change in metabolic rate was measured and blood was drawn to determine several metabolic and endocrine markers. Another 60min later, PET-CT scanner images (cf. figure 2, right) to quantify BAT mass and activity were taken. Since the participants obviously had to get rid of their cooling vests for this procedure, the total cold exposure time was limited to 120min, so that it is questionable how valid the 24h energy expenditure calculation (cf. figure 3) actually is. After all, it is not very likely that the norepinephrine levels would constantly stay at 200% over baseline (cf. figure 2).

Figure 2: Metabolic and endocrine effects (expressed relative to saline) of ephedrine injection and cold exposure (main image); CT scans with green arrows in the combined scans indicating  the principal cervical, supraclavicular,
and thoracic depots of BAT (Cypess. 2012)

As far as the acute phase is concerned, it is yet quite obvious that both cold exposure and ephedrine elicited statistically significant effects on various metabolic and endocrine parameters. The exact nature and the purported mechanism that is responsible for these metabolic and endocrine effects are however very different for both treatments:

• while ephedrine lead to an increase in blood glucose (probably subsequent to increased glyconeogenesis), cold exposure did not 
• while ephedrine lead to significant increases in lactic acid levels (corresponding to increases in glucose + glucose oxidation), cold exposure did not
• while ephedrine lead to profound increases in β-hydroxybutyrate (increased ketone productions from fat), cold exposure did not
• while ephedrine increased serum non-esterified fatty acid (NEFA) concentrations (due to increased lipolysis), cold exposure did not
• while ephedrine elevated insulin production (probably due to stress induced insulin resistance), cold exposure did not (p = 0.29)
• while ephedrine lead to highly significant (p < 0.001) increases in C-reactive peptide, cold exposure elicited "only" significant elevations (p = 0.005)
• while ephedrine produced already highly significant increases in noripenephrine levels, those were even more pronounced upon cold exposure
• while ephedrine lead to statistical significant increases in thyroid hormone Total T3 (+14%, p = 0.026) and Free T4 (+19%, p = 0.014), cold exposure did not
• while ephedrine lead to a profound (-22%) and statistical significant (p = 0.007) drop in ghrelin ("hunger hormone" and metabolic regulator), cold exposure did not

In conjunction with the combined CT scans from figure 2 these differences clearly indicate that contrary to ephedrine, which is a mere sympathomimetic (put simply a potent "stim" ;-) without depot-specific (here brown adipose tissue) thermogenic effects, mild cold exposure (remember: those were no ice-baths!) has the ability to stimulate brown adipose tissue (BAT) energy expenditure without significant systemic effects on heart rate or thyroid hormone metabolism.

What does that mean? Is GNC soon going to carry cooling vests instead of fat burner pills?

If you read the scientists' rave conclusion that "[i]n contrast to ephedrine [...] mild cold exposure stimulates a specific response by the SNS [sympathetic nervous system] to activate BAT and increase energy expenditure with few other metabolic effects" and their subsequent reference to the "obesity and diabetes pandemics" and the demand for "safe and novel treatments" of the latter, it is quite understandable that people who are referred by their gurus to "scientific evidence" like this are willing to believe that "cold thermogenesis" would help them to finally get rid of their beer-, burger- and burrito-bellies.

Figure 3: Increase in 24h energy expenditure (kcal/day, left) and detectable BAT volume (right; Cypess. 2012)

If you do yet take a look at the actual metabolic effects (cf. figure 3) the 2x more pronounced effect of ephedrine on 24h energy expenditure (+140kcal/day vs. 70kcal) confirms what my previous overview of the metabolic and endocrine effects of ephedrine and cold exposure already suggested: Ephedrine does not simply have more "side effects" it is also more effective.

Figure 4: Activity of BAT activity in relation to body fat levels (van Marken Lichtenbelt. 2009)

Important:  One thing the scientists wink at in both the abstract as well as the conclusion are the profound inter-individual differences in terms of detectable BAT volume and activity. While the median volume of detectable brown adipose tissue in men and women was 22mL and 20mL, respectively, there was one female subject with a BAT mass of 190mL (85x over median!), one with 7ml and one woman without any detectable brown adipose tissue. Similarly, the BAT mass in the men ranged from 46mL to 12mL. Both the existence of individuals without any significant amounts of metabolically active body fat, as well as the observation of high inter-personal variability in the study at hand stand in line with previous results of Saito et al. who found a ratio of 15/32 (45%) non-responders in young (23-35y) and 22/24 (92%!) in older (38-65y) subjects (Saito. 2009). And as if that alone would not render the practical value of cold exposure as a means to battle the "obesity and diabetes pandemic" questionably enough, van Marken Lichtenbelt et al. report that exactly those people for whom ephedrine and other sympathomimetics such as sibutramine would actually pose a non-negligible health risk, i.e. obese and metabolically deranged people, don't just have 40% less brown adipose tissue, but also a -76% reduced BAT activity (van Marken Lichtenbelt. 2009; cf. figure 4). The implications of these findings should be obvious: It is a) by no means certain that sitting in a non-heated room, let alone an ice-bath, is not just going to give you a cold, but even if it works it is b) probably not going to make a difference for those people who need it most - I mean, let's do the math: "70kcal/day minus 76% of the former equals 16.8kcal per day"!

That being said, even the profoundly greater total increase in energy expenditure in the ephedrine group is of a "magnitude" (I would write "minitude" if such a word existed) that would be completely negligible if it were not for the bad and "dangerous" sympathostimulating side effects (Andraws. 2005), which will allow you to train longer, to diet harder (Astrup et al. ascribe 75% of the weight loss effect due to the ingestion of the infamous ECA stack to anorexia, i.e. loss of appetite; cf. Astrup. 1992) than any ice-filled bathtub in the world will ever do.

Skip on ice-baths, stop winning about the ephedra ban. Get your diet & workouts in check!

Image 2: I don't think Francine Sablan, IFBB Figure Pro and like Adelfo one of Myotropics' sponsored athletes, uses the air-conditioning, let alone a funky cooling vest or ice-baths to propel her fat loss. And why would she? She loves working out and she has her diet in check ;-)

I know this is not going to be a popular conclusion, but believe me, the additional +70kcal/day you could expend in the cold, if you are one of the lucky non-obese "responders" (see red box above), won't make you lose a single pound. Even the "good old" ECA stack (remember: the Cypess study used intravenously administered ephedrine; hence, the effect sizes are directly comparable with pertinent studies from the late 1980s and 1990s using orally administered herbals) worked its fat burning magic only, when it was combined with a comprehensive diet and exercise protocol - and in those scenarios it was mostly the influence of its sympathostimulating activity on your ability to adhere to your diet and to endure the hardships of strenuous workouts and not its often-touted and largely overestimated "thermogenic" effects (cf. Astrup. 1985; Astrup. 1992) that were mostly responsible for the larger-than-life results, people are still raving about.

References:

1. Andraws R, Chawla P, Brown DL. Cardiovascular effects of ephedra alkaloids: a comprehensive review. Prog Cardiovasc Dis. 2005 Jan-Feb;47(4):217-25. 
2. Astrup A, Bülow J, Madsen J, Christensen NJ. Contribution of BAT and skeletal muscle to thermogenesis induced by ephedrine in man. Am J Physiol. 1985 May;248(5 Pt 1):E507-15.
3. Astrup A, Toubro S, Christensen NJ, Quaade F. Pharmacology of thermogenic drugs. Am J Clin Nutr. 1992 Jan;55(1 Suppl):246S-248S.
4. Cypess AM, Chen YC, Sze C, Wang K, English J, Chan O, Holman AR, Tal I, Palmer MR, Kolodny GM, Kahn CR. Cold but not sympathomimetics activates human brown adipose tissue in vivo. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Jun 4. 
5. van Marken Lichtenbelt WD, Vanhommerig JW, Smulders NM, Drossaerts JM, Kemerink GJ, Bouvy ND, Schrauwen P, Teule GJ. Cold-activated brown adipose tissue in healthy men. N Engl J Med. 2009 Apr 9;360(15):1500-8. Erratum in: N Engl J Med. 2009 Apr 30;360(18):1917.
6. Saito M, Okamatsu-Ogura Y, Matsushita M, Watanabe K, Yoneshiro T, Nio-Kobayashi J, Iwanaga T, Miyagawa M, Kameya T, Nakada K, Kawai Y, Tsujisaki M. High incidence of metabolically active brown adipose tissue in healthy adult humans: effects of cold exposure and adiposity. Diabetes. 2009 Jul;58(7):1526-31. Epub 2009 Apr 28.

Temporary +100kcal/day Cold Thermogenesis Response W/ Exotic Ginger Extract. Plus: Green Tea Reduces Shivering

 Grains of paradise pods - do they hold the secret to "true" fat thermogenic fat burning for those who are lucky enough to have a significant amount of brown adipose tissue (BAT) on their frame? (Photo by Inna Moody / Flickr: innamoo)

Just got an email from my friend Carl Lanore, who dug up a soon-to-be-published study on the thermogenic effects of ginger... well, not exactly ginger as in Zingiber officinale but rather "ginger" as in Grains of paradise (GP). Huh? Yeah, sounds more as if you had bought it in a "coffee shop" or another outlet for legal highs, but it's actually a species of the ginger family, Aframomum melegueta to be precise that contains a similar composition of the characteristic pungent, aromatic ketones such as 6-paradol, 6-gingerol and 6-shogaol. In previous rodent studies an alcohol extract of GP seeds and 6-paradol has been shown to activate BAT thermogenesis in small rodents and in the study at hand it did the exact same for 12 out of 19 healthy male volunteers aged 20–32 years who underwent 2h of cold-exposure.

4 weeks Aframomum melegueta extract can promote, but not induce cold thermogenesis (CT)

In the four weeks prior to the study, the subjects had ingested four capsules of an ethanol extract from the seeds of Grains of paradise for breakfast, three capsules after lunch and three capsules after dinner without noticing any adverse events.

Photo montage - BAT(-) subject no black = metabolically active spots in the supraclavicular and paraspinal regions (left), right BAT(+).

The seeds the scientists used in the study at hand, had been bought from a spice supplier at the Côte d’Ivoire, had been soaked for extraction in five times volume of 95% ethanol for 24 h at reflux condition, the resulting ethanolic extract was filtrated and the solvent was removed under vacuum. According to Sugiat et al. this procedure yielded an extract with 4.2% of the original weight of the GP seeds containing 15.2% 6-gingerol, 12.5% 6-paradol, 1.7% 6-shogaol and 4.0% 6-gingeredione. 10mg of the extract were capped with 190mg of a mixture of rapeseed oil (158mg) and beeswax (32mg) in a capsule, so that all participants ended up consuming the same dosage of ~33mg of active ingredients on a daily basis.

Ah, and since I know you would ask: I do believe regular ginger will do the job "as well". Not necessarily as in "as potently", but it will certainly do something. After all you will find the same main active ingredients (in put them in italics above) in the "grains of paradise" in HPLC analysis of regular Zingiber officinale, as well.

Cold thermogenesis (CT) works in some, yet not all subjects

I've written about cold thermogenesis the influence of body fatness and the lack of BAT in many humans before (read more)

As previous human studies have show, the first and most important determinant of the effects to cold exposure was yet not the extract, but rather the presence of BAT in the subjects supraclavicular and paraspinal regions.

Now what's interesting is that those subjects with without any significant BAT were not significantly lighter / heaver, leaner or muscular than their peers who showed a thermogenic response of max. +100kcal (vs. placebo) in response to the Grains of paradise seed (GP) preload.

The latter it interesting as previous studies have suggested that body-fatness is a negative modulator cold thermogensis (cf. "Cold Thermogenesis - A Safe Ephedra Alternative? 70kcal Increase in 24h Energy Expenditure is Negligible, 50% Lower Than Ephedrine, Not Likely to Occur Obese or Older People" read full-post). On the other hand the inter-group differences between resonders and non-responders were so small that the results of the study at hand are actually pretty meaningless with respect to the issue of identifying probable responders and non-responders by body type (which was virtually identical in all the participants).

You better know in advance whether you are BAT(+) or BAT(-) ...

... because otherwise you would not just be wasting your time while sitting for 1h in an air-conditioned room at 19.8°C with light clothing after an overnight fast (that was the exact procedure in the study). but also your money on any (certainly soon to be commercially available) Aframomum melegueta extract.

Figure 1: Changes in energy expenditure during cold exposure (value scaled to daily equivalents values, left). Area under the curve of the energy expenditure for BAT(+) and BAT(-) subjects (right), please mind that these are the "real" non-scaled energy expenditures in kcal/h (Sugita. 2013)

After all the data in figure 1 shows quite conclusive that in the BAT(-) subjects the addition of the GP extract actually blunted the already minimal (and non-significant) thermogenic response to cold exposure.

And what about green tea? While the title of a recent study suggests that green tea could be another CT adjuvant (Gosselin. 2012), the effect size Gossselin et al. observed in their trial that involved eight healthy non-cold acclimatised men, was laughable. Or do you think that it makes a difference whether you spend 5.4kcal/h or 5.9kcal/h extra? No, well me neither. So unless you are not into the ~15% reduction in shivering or the minimal shift from glucose to fat oxidation that occurred in the subjects who ingested 600mg of EGCG and 600mg of caffeine before their 2h in a liquid-conditioned suit perfused with 15°C.

So what? I know a few lazy asses won't like to hear that, but you can as well jog 15 minutes, do a single 10min HIIT session, hit the weight or simply stand at your office desk instead of sitting in front of your computer all day if you want to expose the gigantic amount of 100kcal per day. So what on earth do you even care about all that?

Contrary to taking supps for weeks before sitting in the cold, working out, moving and even standing (though to a lesser degree) will also increase your fitness level and shift your energy consumption from glucose to fat, something freezing and pill-popping won't do. And what's more all these methods will be more not less effective (cf. previously cited post, red box) if you are still obese.

That does not say that ginger, grains of paradise and EGCG (see box on the right) could not help you lose weight, but if they do, it's probably mostly due to their profound health effects, which are probably a way better reason to drink your ginger and green tea or take respective supplements if you don't like those, anyway.

Read more about ginger and green tea at the SuppVersity and or learn more about "the magic of Ginger and its pleiotropic effects on health, well being, performance and cancer prevention" on SHR Episode 753 (without my contribution, though ;-).

References:

• Gosselin C, Haman F. Effects of green tea extracts on non-shivering thermogenesis during mild cold exposure in young men. Br J Nutr. 2012 Dec 14:1-7.
• Sugita J, Yoneshiro T, Hatano T, Aita S, Ikemoto T, Uchiwa H, Iwanaga T, Kameya T, Kawai Y, Saito M. Grains of paradise (Aframomum melegueta) extract activates brown adipose tissue and increases whole-body energy expenditure in men. Br J Nutr. 2013 Jan 11:1-6.