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7 April 2010
Can Nitric Oxide Help With a
Weight-Loss Program?
Dr. Alexander Schauss
Raena Morgan: Here’s a question that a lot of people would like answered. Can nitric oxide help with a weight-loss program?
Dr. Alexander Schauss: That’s a terrific question, and in fact researchers have been studying that for quite a number of years. It’s an excellent program. First of all, L-arginine is required in muscle metabolism. That’s important because when you do any type of exercise, one of the things you’re doing is building muscle. And one of the beautiful things that muscle cells do is they use a lot of energy and that energy is being expended all the time. So even when you’re sleeping, your muscles are metabolizing energy. And to metabolize that energy in something called the Kreb’s Cycle, where L-arginine is involved in this Kreb’s Cycle, this energy production, it pulls energy from different sources. One of the sources it pulls from is from adipocytes…fat cells. And these fat cells provide some of the substrate necessary to produce energy. So if you can do anything to increase muscle metabolism, by producing more muscle, which L-arginine does, this actually helps eventually draw some of that fat out of there. It’s actually more interesting because what they found is that when you increase muscle mass, you can also reduce body fat. That’s partly because of this energy cycle that’s involved. And it happens to be that when insulin levels are too high, as they are in individuals who have too much weight, you want to bring those insulin levels down. L-arginine is actually involved in some of that reduction of the insulin over-utilization, which contributes to why the body gets so fat.
RM: The insulin resistance.
AS: The insulin resistance issue, exactly. So there has been growing evidence that there is a role for L-arginine in helping to provide weight maintenance. Not so much weight-loss, but weight maintenance. One of the things that we notice when people are exercising on a regular basis is at first they don’t notice too much of a change in their weight because what’s going on is they’re building muscle, especially when they’re doing resistance exercise, and it’s a slow process of starting to utilize all that excessive body fat. As that body fat starts to get utilized, and now there’s a limit to how much muscle mass you can build, suddenly you see the equation start to improve and you actually start seeing body weight loss, which you can measure on a scale.
RM: Well, people start to get smaller when they reduce the fat on their body and so they may weigh the same, but they’re smaller. And because muscle doesn’t take up as much space as fat does.
AS: Right. But it weighs more. And that’s the trick, where some people get a little discouraged after several weeks of working out and they really don’t see that there’s anything happening on the scale. What they have to realize is that what they’ve done is increase the body’s exercising itself constantly and utilizing that fat to try to keep that energy production going to help with muscle metabolism.
RM: And L-arginine does that.
AS: L-arginine we know increases muscle mass.
RM: Excellent. Thank you
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