Stop Demonizing Fat and Start Organizing It!

I love personifying the various systems in the human body when I teach. It adds just the right amount of life to what could otherwise be terribly boring or overly complex for the average person to grasp. I came up with the saying, “stop demonizing fat and start organizing it,” in response to a student’s complaints that she just wasn't seeing much change on the scale despite looking and feeling better than ever. It’s also a playful homage to the brilliant organizing phenom, Marie Kondo, whose approach on home organization took the world by storm with her method, KonMari, which ritualizes an otherwise dreadful task. Similarly, people feel as though dealing with excess weight has to be just as dreadful. The goal of this paper is to show you that you too can love your fat (which we call adipose tissue in the lab and as such, will use interchangeably throughout the paper), but only after you understand exactly what it is, how it works and create a plan to get that shit organized!

Modern society has for decades been at war with fat. We are bombarded with messaging on all fronts feeding us an unhealthy dose of misinformation making fat the scapegoat for nearly all health related issues. The examples of this are everywhere you turn. The Food Industry is obsessed with highlighting how little of this essential nutrient the product they represent contains. Marketers in the Fitness Industry use a myriad of different tactics in attempt to make people feel bad about themselves and get them to listen to their car salesman-like sales pitch. Physicians in the western medical model, whom we are supposed to trust have the most up to date information, continue to preach the avoidance of fat (and salt) in our diets for fear that it will have a deleterious effects on our cardiovascular systems (this has long been refuted - insert research). And of course, the worst offender of all: social media..which reminds us daily that we will never look as good as the photoshopped images they swear are real! 

So what should you believe? What if I told you this same fat that all of the aforementioned examples listed didn’t deserve the negative publicity and that we *need* it far more than we originally thought. To understand this point, let’s get a little nerdy, shall we? :)

 First, lets clarify something - fat is not extra packing material! For centuries, anatomists discarded this in buckets in their hasty attempt to get to the more beautifully uniform layer of the body (which was far easier to draw, mind you), the musculoskeletal layer. This, despite the fact that fat houses critical parts of the nervous system, circulatory system and the lymphatic system (just to name a few)!

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about the impacts the pharmaceutical industry infiltrating the food chain (yes, this happened) has on our bodies and in particular our unsung hero, adipose tissue. Monsanto, which controls much of our food production today was founded in 1901 as a chemical company which specialized in commodity food additives. This seemingly benign company got it’s start introducing the world to things like artificial sweetener (saccharin - the pink stuff), caffeine and vanillin - the answer to every homemaker’s prayers. But by mid-20th century Monsanto expanded it’s reach considerably and became the producer of multiple known carcinogens like, PCBs, Agent Orange, the insecticide DDT, Round-up and rBGH to name a few. By the 1980’s, the company got into genetic plant modification and was the first to introduce GMOs, or genetically modified  organisms, in 1983. This was a scientific marvel billed as a solution for issues like disease, drought, insect infestation, etc. with such enhanced production quality & yield that they claimed we would finally have the solution to the growing global hunger crisis. To give you an idea just how popular making a dent in this global humanitarian crisis was, nearly every nation on the globe participated in Live Aid in 1985, one of the largest simulcast events to date (which reached an estimated 1.9 billion people), to raise funds and awareness for the famine plaguing Ethiopia at the time. Needless to say, this made convincing governments to green light field tests for genetically modified crops all the more easy.

So why focus so much on a biotechnology firm? To get the answer to this question, I want to take you guys into the operating room where John’s Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health commissioned a research project to find out why some patients were getting infections despite undergoing seemingly flawless operations in the most pristine medical environments. They discovered that fat can release toxins into the bloodstream during surgery - particularly bariatric surgery. This was truly mind-blowing for those of us that study fascia but also drastically improved patient outcomes when new guidelines were put in place to prevent the potentially toxic “leaking” of fat during surgery. So what exactly made some of these patient’s fat toxic and why was this seemingly more prevalent in more obese patients? This warranted further exploration since the answers would provide insight into the profound roles that adipose tissue plays in the human body that go well beyond insulation. 

It turns out the very forever chemicals that were mentioned earlier, like PCB’s, Round-Up, rGBH, etc. were the culprits for many of the post-operative infections that patients were dealing with. The challenge is that these chemicals don’t break down easily in nature so our bodies upon recognizing this, attempt to protect us, sequester and encapsulate them in our adipose tissue. Needless to say, this doesn’t bode well for us long term and there is now research which shows how we can reach a relative saturation point and that it can be quite difficult for us to get rid of these chemicals entirely. How does this affect us? Well, for starters, it makes it harder for us to organize this tissue (or what popular culture would call “burning fat”) since its new role is holding these chemicals under house arrest while the body figures out the safest way to process and ultimately pass the from your system. Given this logic, with enough exposure to these chemicals (and ingestion of preserved foods), we are practically pickling or embalming the fat in our living bodies, making it virtually impossible to operate as it was intended to. So we should really think twice before ingesting food products with multi-syllabic chemicals that are impossible to pronounce!

The solution is getting the client to learn how to isometrically contract the deep layers of the affected area first. Then, with the help of mechanostimulation (or soft tissue work) to regain or obtain for the first time proprioceptive awareness of that superficial fascia. Then we move onto activation drills taking that tissue through it’s full range of motion to help repattern/reintegrate it. Finally, we repeat these patterns under load and/or dynamic stress to help initiate the process of building of new neuropathways and the production of collagen fiber to support these repeated actions. Pretty cool if you ask me! This may seem like a lot, but these are some of the concepts that make up the cornerstone of the ALIGN method. Come to a class or workshop where we’ll take you through some of these proven methods so you can experience it for yourself!

In the age of such groundbreaking discovery, it is mind-boggling how health misinformation can STILL spread like wildfire on social media platforms. Why are we as a society, STILL so quick to demonize fat rather than celebrate it for its remarkable ability to support and protect us throughout our lives? Rather than ruminate over this unfortunate fact, I feel it is our duty as health professionals to educate the public and democratize the latest research on this unsung hero we call fat!