Sweating fat loss has become a weight loss trend extremely quickly. However, before you jump on the bandwagon for any of the diets and programs promising this impact, it’s very important to first understand exactly what it is, including the science behind it. The reason is that you might be surprised at where the concept came from and how it is being reflected in many products and programs currently available.
While many people selling weight loss strategies and products would have you believe that sweating fat loss is a well researched and understood method, the truth is that the science behind it remains in very early days. In fact, the concept was only recently identified in mice. It hasn’t been replicated in human studies. Therefore, any of the products and programs pretending that they have solid evidence to back claims like these ones are greatly exaggerating the matter.
The main research behind the concept of sweating fat loss comes from the efforts a team of scientists are making to better understand the immune system. They have been looking into the relationship between the immune system and the metabolism of adipose fat tissue.
The researchers were from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. They speculated that they would be able to use an immune signal called thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP) which is a cytokine. The idea was to bump up those levels to treat insulin resistance, which is a common barrier to weight loss. What they found was that TSLP both improved glucose metabolism and reduced the weight in mice.
What the researchers were surprised to discover was that the weight loss didn’t seem to be associated with anymore physical activity, a faster metabolism, a reduction in food intake, or any more calorie excretion. In fact, the mice that were given the TSLP were eating 20 to 30 percent more than the control mice and still lost weight.
Then, the lead scientist behind the study, University of Pennsylvania associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine Dr. Taku Kambayashi, Ph.D. noticed that the mice treated with TSLP had noticeably shinier coats than the control mice.
The researchers analyzed the treated mice and found that they were undergoing a kind of sweating fat loss. A fat-rich calorie-dense sebum was secreting from the skin sebaceous glands in the mice. The research findings were reported in the Science journal.
This helps to explain why fat loss through sweating remains an early concept and is specific to a treatment. For that reason, it’s not ready to be marketed as a weight loss strategy for humans, though it is promising for future research.