What does it mean to “burn fat”.
Where does it go?
Despite what Doctor Who suggests, it doesn’t just grow legs and walk away.
It actually disappears into thin air!
Hey guys julia here for DNews
New year brings new resolutions.
For many that means getting back to the gym.
“Feel the burn!”
seems to be the rallying cry for exercise enthusiasts everywhere.
And how many magazines have flashy covers like “10 new ways to burn fat in the new
year!”.
But what does that even mean?
How can you “burn fat”?
And where does it go?
When you eat too much protein or carbs your body converts it and stores it as fat.
To get your body to “burn” up these cells, you body has to use up the immediate energy
from food, and dip into your energy reserves.
In other words, you burn more calories than you take in so you have to use your fat stores.
And that adipose tissue or fat, is made up of fat cells called adipocytes filled with
molecules called triglycerides.
When you’re trying to “burn fat”, you’re really trying to get rid of these triglycerides,
high levels of which are linked with heart disease and metabolic syndrome.
Triglycerides are made up of glycerol and three fatty acids.
In order to burn fat you have to oxidize these molecules.
Now the complete oxidization of a single Triglyceride involves many biochemical processes and enzymes.
But the process can be boiled down to a single chemical equation.
C55H104O6+78O2→55CO2+52H2O+energy Now this may look complicated but what’s
basically happening here is that when you're exercising you’re tapping into your fat
stores, so you are “oxidizing” or breaking down that molecule to release carbon dioxide,
water and energy.
I bet you’re imagining that most of that fat gets turned into energy, like your gym
teacher or personal trainer tells you.
Well they’d be wrong.
According to a study published in the British Medical Journal most of the fat turns into
carbon dioxide and water.
According to their calculations, 84% of an adipose triglyceride is given off as CO2.
So for example if you lose 10 kg of fat, 8.4 kg is exhaled as CO2.
As the lead author says, when someone burns fat, “most of the mass is breathed out as
carbon dioxide.
It goes into thin air."
The rest is given off as water in some way or another, like in urine, sweat, tears or
other bodily fluids.
The authors also calculated about how much carbon dioxide we give off on an average day.
Even without hitting the treadmill, with every breath we take, we give off 33 g of carbon
dioxide.
Woohoo!
But before you get too excited about losing all that CO2 and burning all that fat, the
authors also note that a single muffin contains 20% of your daily intake of energy.
A single, lousy, muffin.
Ugh.
So a small amount of food can quickly make all that exercise for naught.
But if you do want to get more bang for your breath, you can actually measure how much
fat you’re burning by measuring your breath.
At CES this year, Seattle based company Levl previewed one such device.
It measures the amount of acetone on your breath, which is another by-product of fat
catabolism.
To measure the level of acetone, a person breathes into a little pod, then places the
pod into the device which will then display a number 1-5 indicating the level of “fat
burning”.
So if you want to stick to that new year's resolution...take a deep breath, hit the gym
and feel the burn.
Losing weight in the future will be weird.
No only will your breath keep track of how much fat you’re burning but an algorithm
will decide what you should be eating!
To find out more about that, check out this episode right here
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more!
How do you exercise or keep in shape?
Let us know