The science behind the meat sweats

A  friend of mine asked that I write about an important medical condition that will likely afflict us all at one point in our lives (except perhaps vegetarians). A diagnosis involving discomfort, physiological distress, remorse, and possibly embarrassment. I am referring, of course, to the meat sweats.

Following a barbecue, particularly Korean or Argentinean in nature, or a rib-eating contest, one might find oneself feeling flushed, overcome by fatigue, and noticing a telltale dampness underneath the arms. As your body processes what it has just been forced to consume, you might begin to perspire profusely, purging liquid-protein through your pores.

While scientists posit that the meat sweats aren’t actually real, and indeed there are no academic papers dedicated to the topic, we carnivores know better.

There are a couple popular theories regarding the sweats, ranging from the high salt content in many cured meats – your body sweating more in an effort to expel the extra sodium – to the pure adrenaline experienced while eating another formerly living creature (apparently this is even greater if you hunt and kill the animal yourself).

Most likely though, the meat sweats are caused by the thermic effect of protein. While it may seem like every calorie you eat fixes itself permanently to your gut, the energy in food is conserved in several different ways. This includes fueling the process your body must go through to breakdown and digest what it is consuming. Remember the rumor that eating celery actually burns calories? This is purportedly because your body uses more energy to digest the fibrous vegetable than it contains (this is unfortunately not true, though you’re still unlikely to gain much weight on a diet of rabbit food).

As your body works to breakdown a meal, it begins to heat up, and just like any machine, the harder it works, the hotter it gets. Eating a lot of anything can cause this phenomenon, but a diet high in protein is particularly susceptible to turning you into a furnace. This is because protein has more than twice the thermic effect of fat or carbohydrates, with 15-35% of the energy consumed in a steak being required to digest it. This applies whether it’s chicken, hamburgers or tofu you’re chowing down on, though the soy sweats are a lesser-known phenomenon, probably because there aren’t many tofu-eating contests out there.

This thermic effect is one reason diets like Atkins and Paleo have taken off. However, before you dive face first into a plate of pulled pork, keep in mind that fat (the other main ingredient in bacon) has twice the energy density of protein at 9 calories per gram, but only burns off at a measly 5-10%.

So with barbecue season around the corner, try to control yourself and consume in moderation. But if this isn’t possible, prepare yourself a comfortable digestion spot on the couch, maybe with a towel underneath, and get ready to ride it out. At least you can be comforted that science is on your side.

Happy meating!

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Forget the stair master, brown fat is where the burn is at

There has been a flurry of articles recently about brown fat, the holy grail of body tissues. Brown fat is “good” fat that helps keep the body warm by burning a large number of calories, thereby helping to rid the body of “bad” fat. Until three years ago, brown fat was thought to exist only in rodents, where it was most commonly seen in the young and in thinner animals. However, we now know that brown fat is also present in human infants and is important for keeping newborns warm because they cannot shiver to create their own body heat. Brown fat was thought to gradually disappear as individuals age, but scientists now believe that adults can retain small levels of their brown fat from childhood, with thinner individuals maintaining a greater amount. What’s more, exercise can aid in this retention.

How brown fat promoted weight loss was not understood until recently. Researchers from Canada shed light on this process using PET-CT scans to identify the metabolic processes involved in brown fat. Published this month in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the researchers subjected participants to acute cold exposure by placing them in a special liquid thermo-controlled suit at a temperature of 18 degrees Celsius (64 degrees Fahrenheit) for 90 minutes. During the course of this exposure, brown fat in the upper back experienced a significant increase in cell metabolism while working to keep the body warm, a process dubbed “cold-induced nonshivering thermogenesis.” The scientists hypothesized that this increase in brown fat metabolism was initially fueled by elevations in extracellular glucose and fatty acid uptake, and when these levels were depleted, the tissue began drawing on stores of intracellular triglycerides, meaning that brown fat was burning off lipid reserves during cold exposure.

As such, total energy expenditure of participants increased during the study by a whopping 80%, resulting in an average burn of an additional 250 calories. Curiously, there was no significant interaction between the amount of brown fat an individual had and their caloric expenditure, despite a wide variability in brown fat levels. However, this lack of effect could be due to the small study sample size, with only six participants. There was an interaction between brown fat and thermogenesis, though, with the added increase in metabolism helping to keep an individual warmer longer, and the more brown fat a participant had, the longer and colder conditions he or she could stand before starting to shiver.

A second study on brown fat looked at a more elusive type whose production is promoted through exercise. Published this month in the journal Nature, researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute discovered a new hormone–christened irisin–that transforms white fat into brown fat. This conversion is dependent upon the transcriptional co-activator PGC1-α, a protein found in muscle tissue that is generated during exercise and involved in metabolism, cell genesis, and protection against muscle atrophy.

Knowing its vast beneficial effects, scientists bred mice to have elevated levels of PGC1-α to determine its influence on brown fat and energy expenditure. Although increasing the levels of the protein had no effect on either brown or white adipose tissue, there were effects in a special type of subcutaneous white fat that is more susceptible to “browning.” This process involves increases in levels of the protein UCP1, which is highly active in brown fat cells and is involved in thermogenesis. These same effects also occurred following a regular exercise program in the mice, facilitated by changes in mRNA expression that was induced by increases in PGC1-α and subsequent protein production.

Through several elaborate experiments, researchers were able to narrow down the proteins to those affected by the gene expression of FNDC5, including the newly discovered irisin. Irisin is significantly elevated in both mice and humans after exercise, and it appears to be the key ingredient in the expression of UCP1 in the transition from white to brown fat. Direct injections of the protein resulted in increased levels of UCP1 in subcutaneous white fat, as well as subsequent increases in metabolism and small decreases in body weight in obese mice 10 days after exposure.

While both of these studies are still in their infancy, their potential implications for future research are very exciting. In the mean time, if you want to lose weight try going for a run, the benefits may be twofold. Alternatively, if you’re too lazy to work out you could try sitting outside in the cold for a while.*

*Please note, I do not actually recommend this as a safe or valid weight loss plan.