From: hal@finney.org
Date: Fri Jun 08 2001 - 00:38:55 MDT
There was a good article a few weeks ago in Science News about a
dietary supplement called CLA, conjugated linoleic acid. I tend to
be skeptical about supplement articles that are published by people who
sell the stuff, but in my experience Science News is generally pretty
careful about accuracy, and this article was really raving about CLA.
It shows signs of fighting cancer, helping with diabetes, reducing
atherosclerosis, regulating the immune system and controlling allergies.
Plus it will help you turn fat into muscle. What more could you want?
Some excerpts from http://www.sciencenews.org/20010303/bob9.asp:
"The first potential health effect of CLA emerged 17 years ago, when
Michael W. Pariza of the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced
that he had isolated an unidentified agent in hamburger that reduced
the incidence of cancer in mice....
Several hundred published studies of CLA's effects in animals and a
few preliminary experiments with people have since suggested an array
of health benefits from the unusual trans fats...
For instance, at an American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting last fall
in Washington, D.C., Pariza presented encouraging, albeit preliminary,
findings from a study aimed at helping people battle the bulge....
By the end of 6 months, all the participants had lost weight--on
average about 5 pounds each. However, one-third of those taking the
CLA, but only one-sixth of the others, increased muscle mass. CLA
caused the dieter's bodies to partition more of the energy from food
into lean tissue, not fat, says Pariza....
Larger doses of the 50:50 CLA formulation hold out tantalizing
prospects for helping people with type II diabetes, according to
another trial reported at the ACS meeting....
"Most exciting and definitely the most significant, statistically,"
she says, was the finding that people taking the CLA supplement had
lower blood concentrations of the hormone leptin compared with the
volunteers taking safflower oil. Other researchers have associated
elevations in blood leptin concentrations with obesity. To Belury,
her provocative leptin data "suggest CLA may act on type II diabetes
via some mechanism affecting [body-]fat accumulation."...
Some other potential benefits of CLA have turned up in animal
experiments. Kritchevsky, for example, recently reported evidence of
CLA targeting atherosclerotic plaque.
In studies with rabbits, he had been looking for agents that don't
just slow a potentially deadly buildup of plaque along artery
walls but actually make these fatty deposits regress. With other
chemical agents, he says, "if you find something that gives you a
few percent regression, you do handsprings. In our studies with [a
50:50 formulation of] CLA, we saw a 30 percent reduction [in existing
plaque]--which is nothing less than phenomenal."...
"In animal experiments, nobody has ever reported anything like this,"
emphasizes Kritchevsky. "This stuff is just amazing."...
So, [Cook] encouraged his colleagues to probe how the mixture of
trans fats perturbs an animal's immune system. In a series of patent
applications, his team reports that CLA dramatically increases several
families of infection-fighting white blood cells, including a type
known as natural killer cells. When the body isn't under assault,
however, CLA appears to dampen down the natural background level
of immune stimulation. Such a dampening, Cook notes, is usually a
good thing.
Findings in several other animal studies, soon to be published,
indicate that CLA supplements may control allergies. In one experiment,
Cook's group sensitized guinea pigs to allergens to serve as models
of allergic asthma. When the researchers exposed the animals' airways
to the allergens, dramatically less airway constriction occurred if
the animals had been fed CLA....
Data from animal studies have consistently shown CLA's anticancer
promise. For example, Clement Ip of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute
in Buffalo, N.Y., recently showed that butter enriched in c9-t11 cut
the risk of mammary cancer in rats that ate it (SN: 12/11/99, p. 375).
The article does caution that not all CLA supplements are equally good.
You should buy from a reputable manufacturer and make sure that the CLA
is composed of the specific isomers which have been shown to be helpful.
See the article for details and names of some companies which have been
used in the studies.
Hal
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