Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Visceral Fat & Hepatic Fat -- Not one and the same

It seems that any time the discussion of fatty livers developing on ketogenic diets comes around, a spate of confusing discussions tend to ensue.  One of the confusing issues is that ketogenic reducing diets are effective at reducing hepatic fat levels.  However, these studies usually start with a fatty liver and with weight loss comes hepatic fat loss.  If there's a study out there where obese people are simply transitioned from a SAD to an equi-caloric ketogenic diet (85+% fat) demonstrating any change in liver fat accumulation, I'm not aware of it.  However I believe the evidence of rodents on such diets is at least enough to be concerned that the change, if any, would be for the worse, not the better.  

A lot of lean people also think, I can't have a fatty liver because I don't have a pot-belly so I don't have visceral fat.  One of the reasons I thought the Eades' 6 Week Cure for the Middle Aged Middle  book was such a disaster is that the first two weeks were supposedly devoted to detoxifying your liver.  There were several references discussing just that, and a reduction in hepatic fat.  I had high hopes for the book at the time, because I was expecting some science on how to specifically reduce visceral fat.  I was disappointed that there was little if any discussion devoted to this topic.  Let's look at the human abdomen.  For starters, the liver is rather assymetrical.  Additionally, although obesity leads to a higher prevalence of fatty liver, lean T1 diabetics have a rather high incidence of the disease.  Roughly a quarter of those with fatty liver disease (FLD) have normal sized livers, so accumulation of hepatic fat does not necessarily increase the size of the liver.  A normal adult liver has a span of 7-10 cm and an enlarged liver is over 2-3 cm larger.  Still, this does not seem to be sufficient to cause a large belly.  Also note the location of the liver.  Most "bellies" are considerably lower.

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