Nutrients
CLA: A Wonder Substance in Animal Fat
Conjugated linoleic acid from animal fats may be a wonder substance: it activates mitochondria, improves endurance, and protects the brain from degeneration.
Nutrients
Conjugated linoleic acid from animal fats may be a wonder substance: it activates mitochondria, improves endurance, and protects the brain from degeneration.
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We must never forget: humans have been eating meat and animal products for over three million years. Even our predecessor species, Australopithecus afarensis, broke open bones and scraped out the marrow over three million years ago.
Make no mistake: if we assume a generation lasts about 30 years, we're talking about an incredible 100,000 generations of humans eating meat or animal products. Throughout much of our past, a generation may have lasted only 25 years, which would mean 120,000 generations.
Something like that must be anchored in our genome. Deeply. In fact, genome analyses – modern tools – reveal many hints that this is so. But we won't be able to fully decode the complexity of the human organism in this regard. We have to trust a bit, for instance in evolution and our developmental history. If you're new to this idea, you can read a summary (in English) here. Then it becomes clear what meat has to do with it.
In any case, there are incredible treasures in the scientific literature that no one talks about. Equally, there are incredible wonder substances in animals and animal fats that no one discusses, yet are actively researched.
In animal fat – more precisely, in the fat of ruminants – we find what may be the healthiest trans fat. We're talking about conjugated linoleic acid, short CLA. It's produced by bacteria in the rumen of ruminants. The more grass the animal eats, the more is produced. The content can vary up to fivefold.
This fatty acid ends up in our food later. Either as beef tallow or bone marrow fat, or as milk fat. Milk fat is generally probably the most important CLA source in our diet, and already relatively small amounts (10, 20 g fat) can, depending on the source (grass-fed?), provide a substantial proportion (= several hundred milligrams) of CLA.
What if CLA has such a strong physiological effect on the human organism that we simply shouldn't go without it?
First and foremost, you need to know that CLA influences our most important problem—it could possibly solve it completely: CLA makes the mitochondria, the powerhouses of our cells, fit. In a simple experiment – and these are often the best – researchers showed that CLA causes more mitochondria to emerge in muscle cell cultures at the push of a button. This was also due to increased activity of the mitochondrial master regulator PGC-1alpha. They wanted to find out what was happening after they had discovered years earlier that CLA-fed mice showed significantly better endurance and increased fat burning.
The same CLA researchers – both from the renowned University of Massachusetts Amherst – were able to confirm these original observations much later by showing in a new experiment that "CLA improves endurance performance through a PPARdelta-mediated mechanism independently of light exercise." This was accompanied by "increased PGC-1alpha" (see above) and a "stimulation of mitochondrial biogenesis."
In other words: these experiments clearly demonstrated that CLA not only activates PPARdelta, the ultimate endurance switch of the cells, but consequently also the proteins needed for that (e.g., PGC-1alpha) and the structures – namely mitochondria – that then multiply at the push of a button. In our language, this means:
Much more energy!
This is incredibly groundbreaking. Yet nobody knows about it. After all, this simple fatty acid exists in food – not as a drug in the pharmacy. But that wasn't all.
CLA has also been shown to protect against sarcopenia (age-related muscle loss) and as a result of its positive effects on energy metabolism ward off blood sugar dysregulation, insulin resistance, and metabolic syndrome, which has been observed multiple times. CLA may be the reason why goat milk according to one study "prevents the development of obesity, fatty liver, and insulin resistance in mice."
What hardly anyone knows is that CLA also accumulates in the brain and works wonders there.
Here it's not just about enjoying more "energy" and possibly increased vitality, but concretely about preventing disease and making the brain more capable.
This means: foods are bioactive and cannot be reduced to a few macronutrients ("saturated fats," for example). Of 100,000 human generations, we are the first to postulate today that we could also live entirely without animal products. Possibly with fatal consequences. But that's another story.
Animal fat provides energy.
A remarkable claim!
