Transcription:

RadioMD Presents:Healthy Talk | Original Air Date: May 11, 2015
Host: Michael Smith, MD

Healthy talk with Dr. Michael Smith MD and now, here's the country doctor with a city education, Dr. Mike.

DR MIKE: Are you trying to lose weight and it's really difficult? I think that's a common scenario, right? I mean, lots of are people trying to lose 10, 20, 30, 40lbs, whatever it may be. It's not easy. It's an uphill battle in many cases and there may be reasons for that. It may not be you. It may not be the diet itself. So, I want to talk about a way I think I can help make your weight loss efforts a little easier, a little more successful and lasting. It has to do with an enzyme that I've talked about before and I'm going to talk about again, but in regards to the research with this.

Now, before I go into the enzyme, this enzyme itself, if you activate it in yourself, it's not in and of itself a weight loss program or a weight loss regimen. Instead, it's one of those things where if you do activate this specific enzyme in yourself, it's going to make whatever diet plan you're on work better. It's going to make your weight loss efforts a little easier. You might get a few extra pounds out of it. Regardless, it doesn't matter.

Maybe you're just cutting calories and you're exercising, maybe you're on Atkins or Weight Watchers, or maybe you're taking some other supplements to boost metabolism, to control appetite, whatever. If you activate this cell-based enzyme, your efforts will go a lot farther than if you don't. What is this enzyme? AMPK. Adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase. We'll just call it AMPK. It's in every cell. So, when I talk about an enzyme, I'm not talking about a digestive enzyme right.

I'm talking about an enzyme that lives inside the cell and this enzyme is so important because AMPK manages how your body, how your cells, , create energy and store energy, when to burn energy, all of those kinds of decisions. Making energy, burning energy, storing energy. That type of cell energy management system, which is so important to the health of the cell. Forget weight for a second, I mean, just the health of the cell is linked to how well it manages energy. Well, guess what enzyme does all that? AMPK. Adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase.

AMPK. When you have a nice level of AMPK activation in the cell, there's all sorts of benefits. I have a sheet here, I presented this in a lecture recently out on Long Island. So here's the benefits of AMPK activation. It can help to ease inflammation. It can actually inhibit cancer cell growth. It can help your body manage blood sugar. AMPK activation can produce new mitochondria, so you make more cell energy.

AMPK activation may actually help to activate longevity genes, called the certain sirtuin genes. And, of course, as we're talking here, it may also help in promoting a youthful body composition.

So, it's a pretty important enzyme. And all of these things that I just covered, they're all really linked to the idea of better cell energy management. If your cell is not able to bring in the sugar very well or the fats; if you cell is not able to take those precursors to energy production, the sugars and the fats; if it's not able to take those precursors and make ATP, cell energy, out of them, the cell stores it up and the cell becomes bogged down with this stuff, with sugar storage and fat storage, and the cell becomes heavy and unhealthy. And if the cells in your body are like that, then ultimately you're going to be like that.

So, activation in AMPK, again, it's not a weight loss program, it's essential to a weight loss program. So, let me review some of this research that I have here of maybe what you can expect if you activate AMPK. The first one here is a study done on rats. I know, we have to start somewhere, though, right?

I have a human one here coming up, but let me just start with the rat one. This was published in Biotechnology Letter, 2012. Mice were orally administered saline, or gynostemma pentaphyllum and the reason I'm saying gynostemma pentaphyllum is that's the plant extract we use at Life Extension to activate AMPK. There are different ways of activating AMPK. One way to do that is calorie restriction, but extreme calorie restriction.

In other ways extreme exercise. There's a drug call Metformin that activates AMPK, but those three things, those three mechanisms of AMPK activation, are tough, right? I mean, I guess anyone can get a prescription for the most part but calorie restriction, extreme exercise, that's tough for people. There are two plant extracts that we're using at Life Extension that do have this effect on AMPK activation and one of them is called gynostemma pentaphyllum and that's what they used in this rat study.

So, they were given gynostemma pentaphyllum at different doses, 150, 200 and 300 mg/kg/day for 8 weeks and the result was pretty impressive in these rats. The best results came at that dose of about 200 mg/kg/day. 8.1% decrease in body weight, 10.3% reduction in deep fat, 15.5% reduction in fat that lines your stomach. Liver weight went down, so the livers even becoming decongested with this, 8.8% reduction in liver weight and there was also a reduction in lipid profiles, cholesterol, triglycerides , stuff like that. So, right here, what we're showing here, and this is compared to the saline group.

So, compared to the saline group there was a significant reduction in rat, there was an improvement in the rat body composition and I've said before, rats make great human models. Gynostemma pentaphyllum is an AMPK activator. Now, when I read you these results you might be like "Wait a second, Dr. Mike, you just said that activating AMPK is really not in and of itself a weight loss program.

I mean, why not? I mean, there's significant weight loss here." Well, you're right, but I'm just not ready to call AMPK activation in and of itself a weight loss program. I think we need some more research. Let me share with you some human research that we do have, though. This was a study done in Obesity 2014, a good peer review journal. This was a randomized, double blind, placebo control trial. Eighty obese people, for 12 weeks, took 225 mg, twice daily, of gynostemma pentaphyllum or a placebo.

So, we're comparing the test group, the group that was activating AMPK, to a placebo group. The results are pretty awesome. They looked at something in this study called total abdominal fat area. So, that's kind of like, I don't know how else to describe it, so I'm just going to do it this way. If you take somebody and you cut them in half, and now you have this circle, you're looking down into their abdomen and you cut them in half and you got this circle.

Well, you know, you can do the area of a circle right, well that's what they did here in a sense. They measured the fat area. If you were to do that to somebody like, you cut them in half and you look down and you see all that fat in there, you can take the area of all that fat and that's what they did. You don't see that type of measurement done too often. What they showed here, the placebo group pretty much remained the same after 12 weeks in this fat area, but the gynostemma pentaphyllum, the group that activated AMPK, had a decrease of over 3 inches squared.

I mean, that's huge. That's a significant amount of dominant fat melting away. I mean, significant. As a matter of fact, they went on to say that there was about, on average, 2 square inches lost, compared to only about 0.4 for the placebo. And that resulted in an inch off waist circumference and a half an inch off of hip circumference, which I've always told you are very important because those are the cardiovascular risk factors, waist circumference and hip circumference.

So, this is really awesome. So, here you have an enzyme in your cells that when you activate it with something like gynostemma pentaphyllum, you're giving the cell all of its power to control energy production, which is critical to any weight loss program. AMPK activation, go check it out.

This is Healthy Talk on Radio MD.

I'm Dr. Mike. Stay well.