Does the grapefruit help with fat loss?
Q: One of my girlfriend's, who doesn't really work out or diet, said she heard that grapefruit has really been shown to help with fat loss. Can she actually be right?
A: Despite not working out or following a proper diet, your friend is actually telling the truth. Although many of us remember the grapefruit diet back in the ’70s, as some ridiculous fad diet, today research is showing how the grapefruit can actually help to encourage fat loss. A study published in 2006 found that subjects who either ate half a grapefruit or drank 8 oz. of grapefruit juice three times a day for 12 weeks lost an average of 4 pounds without changing their diet or exercising. Researchers aren’t exactly sure how grapefruit works to shed body fat. They speculate that it has something to do with a flavonoid called naringin, which appears to enhance insulin sensitivity. Increased insulin sensitivity means that your body requires less insulin to perform the same duties it normally does, such as allow glucose to enter muscle cells. Since insulin is involved in inhibitn fat buirning and increasing fat-storage, having less of it around means your body stores less fat. Higher insulin sensitivity can also aid muscle recovery and muscle strength and size gains. Insulin also kick-starts muscle protein synthesis, which is a fancy term for biochemical processes in muscle cells that leads to muscle recovery and growth.
The lost recent study on grapefruit's fat-fight properties comes from a new study published in a 2009 issue of the journal Diabetes. Researchers reported that mice supplemented with naringenin (what the body turns naringin into) while eating a high-fat diet, typical of what most Americans eat, not only gained less weight than the the mice getting a placebo, but they also demonstrated reduced triglyceride and cholesterol levels, no insulin resistance and completely normal glucose levels, unlike the placebo group. The researchers suggested that this was due to naringenin's ability to increase fat-burning. So try adding a grapefruit or two to your diet, such at breakfast or before workouts. This slow-digesting fruit may help you shed some extra body fat.
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