Caffeine, thermogenesis, weight loss and cellulite

Coffee, thermogenic weight loss and cellulite

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• Can coffee help you lose fat with thermogenesis by stimulating fat burning in brown fat cells?

• White fat (white adipose tissue) stores fat

• Brown fat (brown adipose tissue) burns fat

• Beige fat (beige adipose tissue) temporarily burns fat

• Thermogenesis for weight loss in humans

• Cellulite and thermogenesis

• Thermogenesis with ephedrine

• Thermogenesis with cold

• Thermogenesis with exercise

• It gets even worse, thermogenesis with exercise in the cold

• Thermogenesis with capsaicin

• Thermogenesis with DNP (dinitrophenol)

• Thermogenesis with EGCG, resveratrol, curcumin and other herbal extracts

• Thermogenesis with caffeine

• What does the future hold for weight loss with thermogenesis?

• Thermogenesis and free radical damage on mitochondria, cells and organs

• Low intensity thermogenesis = metabolic improvement

• Caffeine exposure induces browning features in adipose tissue in vitro and in vivo

• Check our professional consultancy in cellulite, skin tightening, ultrasound and radiofrequency

Can coffee help you lose fat with thermogenesis by stimulating fat burning in brown fat cells?

There are different studies that appear from time to time which show that caffeine, other natural chemicals, cold exposure or very intense exercise can help with weight loss via a process called thermogenesis.

Thermogenesis is basically the process of burning fat in one of two special types of fat tissue called ‘brown fat’ and ‘beige fat’.

But what is exactly are ‘brown fat’ and ‘beige fat’?

And did you know that there is also a thing called white fat?

I have keenly followed the subject of thermogenesis in the context of fat loss and cellulite reduction for the last 20 years, so here I will present the facts without any of the hype.

White fat (white adipose tissue) stores fat

White fat tissue is the vanilla variety of fat tissue, the stuff we all love to hate, the one that makes us, well, fat.

White fat’s main purpose is to store fat in our bodies for use on a rainy day. It also produces loads of hormones and other chemicals called cytokines, which are implicated in heart disease and diabetes.

So reducing white fat, or at least reducing some of the cytokines it produces is a big deal, not just for aesthetics but for health reasons as well.

Brown fat (brown adipose tissue) burns fat

In contrast, brown fat, the stuff mentioned in the study, is a type of fat tissue whose sole purpose is to burn fat for heat creation, i.e. to keep us warm.

Brown fat thermogenesis works amazingly well in mice, which have plenty of brown fat to keep them warm. And mice can always readily convert plenty of their white fat into beige fat too, given the right circumstances.

Think of extreme cold or scientists feeding them stimulants, hot chilli powder or natural supplements at 1000x the normal dose - stuff like that.

Mice love thermogenesis and do well at burning fat for heat.

Brown fat sounds like such an amazing idea. Creating lots of brown fat on humans has been the holy grail of weight loss for more than two decades. Imagine if we could find a way to develop brown fat tissue in our body and then we can eat anything we want and just burn it to heat our body.

In this way we could kill two birds with one stone: stay slim and reduce our energy bills - very important right now!. Of course, this is not such a good idea for those who live in places like Dubai, Texas or Africa, and who’s air-conditioning bills would skyrocket...

One small detail: unlike mice, adult humans have very little brown fat. Babies have somewhat more brown fat to help them keep warm, but in just a few months they replace it with white fat and they start keeping warm via shivering thermogenesis, i.e. they create heat, like all us adults, by muscle contractions (shivering).

But despite this very small setback, there is still hope. Enter beige fat.

Beige fat (beige adipose tissue) temporarily burns fat

Now beige fat, is something like a cross breed between white fat and brown fat, hence the name.

Beige fat tissue always starts its life as white fat and then, with the right stimulation - cold, stimulants, hot chilli powder, overdosing on specific supplements, you get the drift - it starts burning fat for heat, like brown fat tissue does.

There is a small detail here too: beige fat never commits to becoming brown fat. As soon as the stimulation ends, it reverts from what scientists call the “beige adipose tissue phenotype” back to the good old “white adipose tissue phenotype”.

In plain English this means that it becomes again good old white fat tissue, which starts storing fat again with wild abandon, just like before the stimulation.

Thermogenesis for weight loss in humans

And those two facts, the fact that you have very little brown fat on you and the fact that beige fat is very fickle and therefore not worth converting to, are the reasons why you have never heard about thermogenesis before. Because it is a pain to start and to maintain.

And then, when you stop trying, it just switches off and leaves you fat and cold again.

Cellulite and thermogenesis

Although you cannot easily lose whole body fat or cellulite with thermogenesis, using thermogenic actives topically can help reduce cellulite.

Not by thermogenesis itself but by the proven lipolytic action that all thermogenic actives possess (caffeine, EGCG, resveratrol, curcumin, forskolin and several others).

The good news is that by using those actives in high concentrations locally on the skin you don’t have to worry about things like liver injury (EGCG) or jitters and anxiety (caffeine), that come with using high quantities of such supplements orally.

Thermogenesis with ephedrine

In the past, people tried to make their fat tissue burn fat with a weak analog of amphetamine, derived from the ephedra plant, called ephedrine. In fact they used to combine ephedrine with caffeine and aspirin for best results, the legendary “ECA stack”.

Ephedrine indeed helped people lose weight with beige fat thermogenesis. But it also gave them the unwelcome gifts of jitters, palpitations, adrenal exhaustion and other nice side effects.

And when they stopped taking it, their beige fat turned back into white and they started putting on more weight, partially due to the adrenal exhaustion. Ephedrine thermogenesis sucks. No wonder it was banned in 2003.

Are you starting to see why thermogenesis is not that popular? I mean, who wants high blood pressure, jitters and palpitations to lose weight? (Some do, I know, the desperate and those who do not respect their body and their health.)

Thermogenesis with ephedrine gives me the jitters 😬

Thermogenesis with cold

Fast-forward fifteen years after the ‘ephedra years’ and you find people talking about living in cold conditions, PERMANENTLY, to keep the weight off.

I say permanently, because as soon as you start living like a normal human being with adequate central heating again, the energetic but fickle beige fat cells become slobby white fat cells again and it is game over for the “cold induced thermogenesis”.

Another option is, of course, to have daily or twice daily cold showers or dip into a bathtub filled with cold water and ice cubes. Try to convince anyone except the very hard core, super-fit people (who don’t need thermogenesis-induced weight loss in the first place) to do that in the middle of the winter. Between getting pneumonia and being overweight, can I stay overweight please?

Needless to say that those “thermogenic” one-week spa breaks in Italy and France with a bit of cold showers and cold baths thrown in here and there are a joke. After the “thermogenic” week and just about when your fat cells decide to take the plunge and become beige, you come back home and revert back to whiteness and nothing happens.

Those spas are marvellous places though. People are nice, the massages are great and the food is to die for. Just don’t expect your fat cells to become fat burning furnaces any time soon. Go there for the pampering, the luxury and the sweet illusion…

Thermogenesis with cold gives me the shivers 🥶

Thermogenesis with exercise

Some other people have decided that it is much better to have “exercise induced thermogenesis” instead. This involves exercising like crazy, which in turn boosts the levels of norepinephrine in their bodies, which in return boosts beige adipose tissue thermogenesis.

That’s great, but doesn’t it sound like the age old mantra “do loads of exercise to lose weight”? Who cares if fat is burned in muscles, like we used to believe, or if some of it gets burned in beige fat, like we have recently found out.

Finding out that if you exercise a lot and at high intensities you lose weight is not such a great discovery.

Again, like in all the previous applications of thermogenesis, when you stop stimulating thermogenesis, it stops. So exercise-induced weight loss, thermogenesis or not, evaporates into thin air as soon as you stop exercising. Not earth shattering news, right?

Now it doesn’t take a genius to realise that people who clock twenty half-marathons a year are not the ones who care about weight loss with thermogenesis. The overweight ones care, and those ones will not be very thrilled to find out that “you know, if you exercise like crazy you can turn your fat cells beige and they will burn fat”. No sh*t, Sherlock.

Everyone knows that you burn fat with high intensity exercise. Who cares if fat burning occurs in muscles or in ‘beige fat’?

Thermogenesis with exercise leaves me bored 🥱

It gets even worse, thermogenesis with exercise in the cold

As I made it clear before, it is the overweight people who care about losing weight. A super fit person who can exercise at high intensity for two hours in extreme cold is not the target group intended to benefit from this.

So we are entering the realm of adventure sports here. If one can run naked in the snow, complete with GoPro-enabled live footage straight onto YouTube for their fans, that’s good for them, but it does not solve the obesity epidemic.

Thermogenesis with exercise in the cold leaves me cold ❄️

Thermogenesis with capsaicin

If cold can make you burn fat, how about the opposite, perhaps something that really burns?

Capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot chilli peppers, was found to also stimulate thermogenesis. So how about taking capsaicin capsules or simply having a big bunch of hot chilli peppers for brekkie? Sounds like a good idea to lose weight?

Great! Now to lose weight with this ‘newfangled thermogenesis thing’, you must endure the runs, feel your back passage burning for months and end up developing haemorrhoids in the process. Doesn’t sound very promising to me.

Thermogenesis with capsaicin gives me the runs 💩

Thermogenesis with DNP (dinitrophenol)

Now if you are really stupid, you will go for the real deal, the royal road to thermogenesis. Drum roll and enter DNP.

Dinitrophenol (DNP) is a small, simple molecule that creates so much thermogenesis that can - almost literally - fry your organs from within. You take the (banned) DNP pill, and you can be rest assured that your body will cause so much thermogenesis that you will sweat. Profusely. And, if you don’t die or fry your organs from within and then die, you will indeed lose weight.

With DNP, cells all over your body - not just beige fat cells - burn so much fat that they release so many free radicals that actually cause organ damage. Plus, as cells use up all the energy for heat, they have no energy for the vital processes they should perform, which also contributes to organ failure.

DON’T DO IT AT HOME - or anywhere else for that matter.

Thermogenesis with DNP is deadly ☠️

Thermogenesis with EGCG, resveratrol, curcumin and other herbal extracts

Around the time of the ECA stack, mentioned above, word got around that green tea is thermogenic and people started using it together with the ECA stack or together with caffeine.

We are not talking about a cuppa of green tea here or a hipster matcha tea ceremony, such as the ones you see on Instagram. We are talking about highly concentrated green tea extracts, equivalent to fifteen or more cups of tea a day. As expected, the liver of some of those people did not warm up to the idea (excessive EGCG from green tea can cause liver damage to some people), so the idea never caught on.

The same applies to other, equally healthful compounds such as resveratrol, curcumin, berberine, quercetin and many others.

Although those natural compounds have numerous health benefits in normal or high doses, to get any decent thermogenic effect out of them you need to use monstrously high quantities, which are only possible by force-feeding mice for experimental purposes.

For example this very comprehensive review mentions:

“High doses of resveratrol (∼400 mg/kg body weight) have been shown to reduce weight gain in high fat fed-fed mice, in association with decreases in visceral fat pad weight and smaller adipocytes in epididymal white adipose tissue”.

Two points here:

• firstly, humans are not mice

• and secondly, 400 mg/kg of body weight is translated into 24,000 mg of resveratrol for the average 60 kg woman, equivalent to, wait for it, 49,200 glasses of wine. Every day.

I rest my case.

(*a person taking one 20-mg resveratrol supplement may ingest the equivalent amount of resveratrol found in 41 glasses of red wine, as the good people at Life Extension Foundation tell us).

Thermogenesis with supplements makes my liver swollen 🐡

Thermogenesis with caffeine

And here we are, 2019 (when this article was first written), and caffeine is said to be the hot new way to set your fat on fire.

I’m sure you can sense my drift here. Caffeine is yet another hard-core compound, similar to ephedrine and capsaicin. You can’t have a lot of it to make a real difference in your weight without developing side-effects.

Also, if caffeine, consumed by billions of people around the world, could make people lose weight - via thermogenesis or any other method - they would know it already and everyone would be on it. Some studies found a minor benefit, but it’s just that, minor.

As another writer states: “Chances are coffee is not going to turn out to be the weight loss miracle and the answer to the obesity epidemic. Otherwise, we would have probably seen more impact on the epidemic already. After all, as an article in the HuffPost indicated, Americans lead the world in coffee consumption, drinking over 400 million cups a day, yet have the twelfth highest obesity rate, according to the CIA World FactBook.”

However, this new study, published at the journal Scientific Reports by researchers at the University of Nottingham (Caffeine exposure induces browning features in adipose tissue in vitro and in vivo, see below), has found that caffeine does indeed stimulate thermogenesis in humans and that it also stimulates the conversion of white fat cells into beige ones, in both mice and humans.

The researchers used new methodology to prove that temperature on the teeny-weeny little fat we have on our neck indeed rises by about half a degree Celsius (~33.8ºC > ~34.3ºC on the spot tested) after one cup of instant coffee containing 65mg of caffeine - a moderate dose indeed.

So perhaps a higher dose, such as the 400mg of caffeine contained in two energy drinks or in four cups of espresso, would have better results, right? What about ten cups of coffee, for even faster weight loss? Or twenty for extreme weight loss?

The problem is that overdosing on caffeine is not a benign thing. It can give people palpitations, cause anxiety attacks, high blood pressure, high heart rate, diarrhoea and leave the adrenals exhausted after continued use. And when you stop overdosing on it, it will just stop working. That beige fat tissue does not stay beige forever.

On the other hand, with low doses don’t expect much fat burning to occur, otherwise all these moderate coffee consumers (1-4 cups a day) would already be slim - or at least slimmer than their non-coffee drinking peers. And there is no evidence of any significant difference in that respect.

Thermogenesis with caffeine gives me palpitations 💓

What does the future hold for weight loss with thermogenesis?

Still the researchers are upbeat. They want to find if specific nutrients, perhaps more benign than caffeine and capsaicin, that can help switch on thermogenesis. With their new experimental design they could screen a few hundred promising compounds, perhaps the ones that already stimulate thermogenesis on mice.

In this way, they can perhaps find the top ten most thermogenic compounds, create a combined pill and make us all lean, mean, overheated machines and help solve the obesity and diabetes crisis.

It is indeed a noble cause and even if it doesn’t bear fruits, it will contribute to our knowledge of thermogenesis, human adipose tissue, diabetes, overweight and obesity. But I am not that optimistic about amazing results any time soon.

The problem is that the known thermogenic compounds must be used at 100x, or even 1000x, times their natural concentration in foods, if they are to make any discernible difference in terms of thermogenesis.

At these doses there are plenty of side effects of all kinds, plus we are talking about consuming 10-20 capsules a day. It works on mice in the lab fed by force and not being able to complain, but it is a totally different thing on humans.

Let’s face is, thermogenesis as it stands today is not very practical, not very effective and not very pleasant either. Let’s hope that the nice people at the University of Nottingham can change this one day.

For the last 20 years thermogenesis has left me disappointed ☹️

Thermogenesis and free radical damage on mitochondria, cells and organs

As we mentioned above, any extra energy production results in mitochondrial free radical damage production too, which actually damages the mitochondrial membrane (mitochondria are the energy powerhouses of each cell in our body).

Damaged mitochondrial membrane inevitably results to cell damage, cell senescence (inflammation) and if on a large scale, organ damage too.

This free radical damage can be mitigated to some extent - but not completely - by antioxidants and even by lipid replacement therapy, which can prevent damage and repair the mitochondria, respectively. However, the whole process becomes more and more expensive and complicated.

So by eating more and then trying to burn more with thermogenesis to ‘balance the books’ in our body, we create damage which has to be mitigated and which would not occur if we didn’t eat so much in the first place.

The moral of the story is the already well-known one: to stay slim, eat less.

Again, no sh*t Sherlock.

Thermogenesis-induced mitochondrial damage makes me feel exhausted 😮‍💨

Low intensity thermogenesis = metabolic improvement

Regardless of how much fat burning the different low intensity thermogenesis regimes can cause, they in fact improve cell, organ and overall metabolic body health.

This, in practice, can involve supplementation with all the supplements mentioned above (EGCG, resveratrol, curcumin etc) or consuming the relevant herbs and spices (green tea, berries, turmeric etc).

Or perhaps having some cold showers or swimming in the outdoor pool or exercising intensively, but not extremely. All these things offer metabolic benefits even if their thermogenic potential is low, unless we do them in an extreme form.

So we may in fact not need to look for the fat burning effects of high intensity thermogenesis and all the problems it causes but for low intensity thermogenesis and all the metabolic benefits it brings.

(Again the basic advice remains: eat less to prevent, instead of eating more and then having to reverse all the metabolic imbalances overeating causes. Simple.)

In that respect, thermogenesis leaves me hopeful for the future 🙏

Caffeine exposure induces browning features in adipose tissue in vitro and in vivo

• Research paper link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45540-1

• Abstract: Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is able to rapidly generate heat and metabolise macronutrients, such as glucose and lipids, through activation of mitochondrial uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1). Diet can modulate UCP1 function but the capacity of individual nutrients to promote the abundance and activity of UCP1 is not well established. Caffeine consumption has been associated with loss of body weight and increased energy expenditure, but whether it can activate UCP1 is unknown. This study examined the effect of caffeine on BAT thermogenesis in vitro and in vivo. Stem cell-derived adipocytes exposed to caffeine (1 mM) showed increased UCP1 protein abundance and cell metabolism with enhanced oxygen consumption and proton leak. These functional responses were associated with browning-like structural changes in mitochondrial and lipid droplet content. Caffeine also increased peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator 1-alpha expression and mitochondrial biogenesis, together with a number of BAT selective and beige gene markers. In vivo, drinking coffee (but not water) stimulated the temperature of the supraclavicular region, which co-locates to the main region of BAT in adult humans, and is indicative of thermogenesis. Taken together, these results demonstrate that caffeine can promote BAT function at thermoneutrality and may have the potential to be used therapeutically in adult humans.

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