Fat and the cytokine.

This is an story about your body and processes that are taking place out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Its not a nursery story but it is one that every person may wish to learn by heart.

My relationship with fat

As a Kinesiology student at the University of Waterloo in the early 1970s, I led a student workshop as a teaching assistant to instruct students in the use a fat caliper to measure subcutaneous fat. The goal of that class was for each student to calculate body composition and a measure of body fat was one component of it.

We were taught that the proportion of fat considered be healthy was 9% for men and 14% for women. As young students, we were not giving much thought to those numbers for older age groups when those proportions often exceed the desired targets by significant margins.

Hidden Fat: The Impact of Intramuscular Fat on Health and Longevity is the name of the Epoch Times article to which I am referring today.

Science knows much more about fat than when I was a university student. This article describes the dangers of fat stored within muscle - intramuscular fat, and the fat stored in and around internal organs - intrabdominal fat. Fat calipers are useless to identify these fat sources. Today, DEXA, CT and MRI scans are the state-of-art methods.

The first time I heard the word ‘cytokine’ was in reference to ‘cytokine storms’ which very ill Covid-19 patients experienced. I have since learned that cytokines play a role in attempting to regulate the levels of fat cells within sketetal muscles and the abdomen. A cytokine receptor is a feature of every fat cell. It acts as a snitch to tell the immune system that an interloper has been found.

Those cytokine receptors on fat cells bind cytokines to signal the immune system that the identified fat cell is unwanted and must the eliminated.

Immune cells arrive to remove all unwanted fat cells (by apoptosis).

Inflammation becomes increasingly evident. Its severity is determined by the numbers of unwanted fat cells tagged by the cytokines for demolition.

Measurements and appearances

Muscles that contain high levels of inter- and intra-cellular fat cells are described as “marbled”, the same term used to describe a fatty steak in your dinner plate. In humans, toned muscles through regular exercise are easy to identify compared and more attractive than the muscles of out-of-shape sedentary people.

An abdomen with high quantities of excess fat cells is identified by waistline measurements. For a woman of average height, 34 inches in the upper acceptable limit. For an average man its 40 inches according to the experts on this matter. Predictably, diet and exercise are the prescriptions to get these metrics under control.

Why does this matter?

Inflammation is the indication of the immune system at work. As the custodian of my immune system, it is in my best interests to reserve its resources for acute cases when I need them most urgently and them can perform at their best. Ideally, I want my immune system to perform like an Olypmic athlete when its called upon.

Chronic inflammation is undesirable because it diverts vital resources away from the site of an acute need such the healing a physical injury or fighting an infection like a flu virus.

During Covid, a television news reporter interviewed a man lying in a Toronto hospital bed who had “miraculously” survived several months of a “fight for his life”. He was clearly a very big man who claimed to have lost nearly 100 lbs since his Covid-19 infection began.  It was evident in the interview that he still had a long way to go to reduce his belt size below 40 inches. This would better prepare him immunologically to battle his next infection.

Not just Covid

The article, Hidden Fat: The Impact of Intramuscular Fat on Health and Longevity, identifies several disease states, including cancer, that are compromised by chronic, fat-induced, systemic inflammation. Unhealthy levels of ‘hidden fat’ lead to poor recovery outcomes according to the current state of research-based knowledge.

It’s all well and good that this knowledge can be found in research journals, but where it is needed most is in the minds of every person who values good health.

This is the reason for my post today.