I refer to the problem as “fat in all the wrong places.” It is most common in overweight people, but can happen in anyone. When such fat surrounds your arteries or heart in excess it generates significant inflammatory signals into your arteries, provoking the process of plaque formation. It is interesting that this is not fat inside your arteries that is doing this, it is fat on the outside – and it is a major health problem faced by millions of Americans.

The most common way this happens to anyone is with excess weight gain. As your white adipose tissue can no longer keep up with efficiently storing excess fat (although it keeps trying), then fat builds up in your liver as a back up defense system against being poisoned by too many calories. Once that system gets overloaded, then fat starts building up in and around organ systems, muscles, and your circulatory system. Such inappropriate fat attracts large numbers of macrophages into it, in turn ramping up a much uneeded inflammation. This is extremely distressful to your cardiovascular system, and if a graphic enough picture of what I am saying were to be shown to any overweight person they would be motivated to quit eating so much food and ruining their own health.

You can also have fat build up around your heart and arteries independent of excess body weight. In this situation, it is an inflammatory problem within the arteries that actually inflames the natural fatty layers around your arteries and makes the tissue grow, in turn making the inflammation within the arteries even worse.

Thus, the problem is part excess weight and part excess inflammation—and is often both. Nutrients that reduce inflammatory signaling are the key to getting out of this problem, as well as losing weight if you are overweight. Key inflammation reduction nutrients include DHA, blueberries, grape seed extract, resveratrol, tocotrienol E, quercetin, curcumin, magnesium, acetyl-l-carnitine, pantethine, silymarin, and many others. 

It is interesting that your brain and liver are the two fattiest organs in your body by dry body weight, with the exception of your white adipose tissue.  Nutrients that address excess fat problems are typically those that help these naturally fattier systems in your body work properly. Thus, trying to help this problem would also help the fitness of your white adipose tissue, your liver, your brain, as well as your arteries. In other words, there are multiple benefits to many areas of your body when you use appropriate nutrition to help solve a specific problem.

Posted by Byron J Richards at 01:41 PM.

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