Dr Perricone*: Coffee has organic acids that raise your blood sugar, raise insulin. Insulin puts a lock on body fat. When you switch over to green tea, you get your caffeine, you’re all set, but you will drop your insulin levels and body fat will fall very rapidly. So 10 pounds in six weeks, I will guarantee it.*
PERRICONE: Coffee raises cortisol, and that raises your insulin levels. That means that you hang on to body fat, and it has inflammation. Inflammation is at the basis of most disease processes, whether it’s heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, it’s all inflammation. So if we can alter inflammation in our body, we can become healthier. Now if you just substitute coffee for tea do nothing else different, in six weeks,you will notice a seven to eight pound weight loss.
SOOOO…what I am asking is concerning straight coffee, and its relationship with cortisol & insulin levels: is the outcome reduced body fat burning? Personally, I drink it black, but realize that whether this is dead accurate or not, i should switch to green tea. It’s cheaper too.
I have done a little research on the subject lately. I am at work so I don’t have all the facts in front of my so please excuse some of my generalizations. Coffee, on its own… black, does raise insulin levels. When the body has and spike in insulin but not a corresponding spike in activity, then the extra fuel (the spiked insulin) is stored as fat. Green tea has been known to be a thermogenic agent for quite some time, but the thermogenesis was usually attributed to the caffeine content. It was then found in an in vitro experiment with brown adipose tissue that the thermogenic effect of green tea was “much greater than can be attributed to its caffeine content per se.” SO you get the caffeine effect, although much less than coffee, and the thmogenic boost.
quote: "In conclusion, we provide evidence that chronic consumption of caffeinated coffee and/or decaffeinated coffee reduces insulin secretion. If our results are confirmed in other populations, caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee consumption might prove to be an effective strategy for reducing insulin resistance, especially in overweight women.
When the body has and spike in insulin
insulin is an endocrine hormone (not a fuel source) which means that it is secreted from one organ (the pancreas) and acts on other tissues (e.g., muscle, fat, liver). Its overall effect is glucose uptake into tissues. In muscle and fat, insulin causes glucose uptake from the blood into the tissues. In the liver (an organ which stores glucose in the form of glycogen), insulin slows glucose release into the the bloodstream.
What spikes insulin levels? For one, food intake, particularly high-carbohydrate meals.
When the body has and spike in insulin but not a corresponding spike in activity
I’m not 100% sure what this means, but insulin actually decreases during exercise. This is to spare glucose (prevent hypoglycemia, essentially) and still fuel the working musculature – working muscle has contraction-mediated pathways to take up glucose that are independent of insulin.
then the extra fuel (the spiked insulin) is stored as fat.
as said above, insulin is not the fuel, but what causes fuel to be stored as glycogen or fat in tissues.
Green tea has been known to be a thermogenic agent for quite some time, but the thermogenesis was usually attributed to the caffeine content. It was then found in an in vitro experiment with brown adipose tissue that the thermogenic effect of green tea was
I have done some in vitro experiments with adipose tissue, and you would be surprised at how different results those experiments can be to those of ‘in vivo’ (ie., in a living animal) experiments.
Also, brown fat is vastly more thermogenic than most other tissues (300 W/kg vs. 1-2 W/kg for most others). Problem is, human have next to no detectable brown fat after birth.
“much greater than can be attributed to its caffeine content per se.” SO you get the caffeine effect, although much less than coffee, and the thmogenic boost.
I’d have to do the math, but to lose 10 lbs of body fat from thermogenic processes in 6 weeks (as Perricone seems to suggest) would probably result in some significant increases in body temp, sweat rate, etc. - to the point that it would probably be uncomfortable (again, i haven’t done the math here). For what it’s worth, bodybuilders have used DNP (yes, the bug spray compound, albeit at lower concentrations) for years to ‘diet by cooking’. DNP is a metabolic uncoupler and basically makes your metabolism less efficient.
Ok, so now where are??? Can cutting coffee for green tea help lose “some” weight or not? Thermogenisis aside, does the coffee help hang on to fat or no?
besides thermogenesis, I don’t see a way that caffeine can help you lose weight in signifcant numbers. maybe there is, and I need to think about it more, but I can’t come up w/ one right off the bat. otherwise, we would see a lot of skinny coffee drinkers, no?
lipolysis from caffeine and re-esterification of fatty acids would only do little in my opinion, if you don’t do anything with the lipid that is released into the blood, ie exercise.
“hang on to fat”
doesn’t really matter. if the fat in the fat cell is broken down and released into the blood stream, then the body needs to use that fat, otherwise it is going to be taken up into the cell again. Even if the fat is used and you have a meal of 100% carbohydrate composition (equal in calories to what you expended during your exercise session), the fat cell will take up the glucose from your gatorade and turn it into fat in a series of biochemical processes. You can’t win
It all comes back to ‘caloric output minus caloric input = weight loss’. sure, there are a few modifiers, but that’s pretty much it.
