Research On New ‘Atkins Hormone’ Gets Mixed Reviews

Filed under: Study — @ June 7, 2007

Drs. Maratos-Flier and Kliewer found the hormone behind Atkins diet

People who are livin’ la vida low-carb already naturally accept the physiology behind this way of eating as an excellent way to burn stored fat through the use of ketosis and that those ketone bodies become our source of energy rather than carbohydrates. We’ve even had studies showing a low-carb diet burns twice as much stored fat as a low-fat diet.

But now we read that two different researcher teams have stumbled upon what one of them describe as a “serendipitous” discovery of a hormone in their studies that actually works as the very mechanism behind why fat-burning is so functional on a low-carb diet.

The lead researcher on the first team, led by Dr. Eleftheria Maratos-Flier who serves as an investigator in the department of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center as well as an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, saw something peculiar happen to mice over a 30-day period that she fed a high-fat, low-carb diet–their lipid profile remained constant and didn’t go up!

Simultaneously, the lead researcher on a second team, Dr. Steven Kliewer who is a professor of molecular biology at the Dallas, TX-based University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, also found FGF21 breaks down stored fat in animals consuming a high-fat, low-carb diet as well as fasting.

The results of both of these studies were published in the June 2007 issue of the scientific journal Cell Metabolism.

Click here to find out why one of the researchers is enthusiastic about this new hormone on future research of high-fat, low-carb diets on humans while the other researcher is less than impressed.