How to shrink the dangerous fat linked to heart disease and cancer in 12 weeks | Prof Jimmy Bell

There's a hidden fat that matters more for your health than your weight. This is visceral fat: it wraps around your organs, raises your risk of heart disease and cancer, and builds up even in people who look slim and healthy. In today’s episode, Professor Jimmy Bell, a world-leading expert in measuring visceral fat, explains how we can shrink this dangerous belly fat in just 12 weeks. Jimmy explores why two people can weigh exactly the same and carry completely different amounts of this hidden fat, what it is, where it hides and why it matters. By the end, you'll have a completely new understanding of body fat, and what it really means for your long-term health. If your weight has stayed exactly the same for years, what do you think is happening underneath it? 🌱 Try our science-backed and tasty wholefood supplement Daily30 🌿Let your gut microbes snack on the ZOE Gut Health Bar Build healthy habits. Download the ZOE app today and start your trial for just £2.30 for your first week. 👉 Join ZOE Follow ZOE on Instagram. Timecodes 00:00 Intro 02:47 The DEXA scan result that didn't match how thin he looked 09:46 Why your body composition can get worse even while your weight stays the same 11:47 What does it actually mean to be "skinny fat"? 14:06 The real reason some people end up "skinny fat" 15:58 Why people carrying more fat might actually be happier 18:10 How visceral fat sends inflammatory signals through your body 21:50 Why having almost no body fat can also make you unhealthy 25:19 Could a supermodel have more visceral fat than a sumo wrestler? 26:44 Why your body stores visceral fat around your organs on purpose 28:08 Why visceral fat is the first fat to disappear when you diet 29:22 How your diet directly reshapes the fat in your body 33:25 How long it actually takes to change your body fat 35:47 Does Ozempic actually get rid of visceral fat? 37:05 Why dieting alone can quietly cost you muscle 38:55 What does yo-yo dieting actually do to your body? 41:20 The pattern he sees again and again in long-term dieters 42:39 Why being thin is no guarantee you don't have visceral fat 44:07 Why diet alone won't get rid of visceral fat 45:24 The exact mechanism that makes exercise target visceral fat first 49:03 Why inflammation and visceral fat together wreck your metabolism 49:50 Why any amount of alcohol is bad news for visceral fat 51:32 How fast visceral fat can actually shrink (as little as 12 weeks) 54:14 Why menopause redistributes fat to your belly 57:20 Resistance training: the single best thing for visceral fat 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati The Appetite Reset by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector Good Mood Food (preorder) by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE The Smart Snacking Guide: How to feed your gut, fuel your day, and snack without guilt The Hormone Harmony Guide: Tuning Your Body’s Internal Orchestra Eating for Better Brain Health: Your brain-gut blueprint How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks Better Breakfast Guide Mentioned in today's episode Fat cell turnover in humans, Nature (2008) New study investigates ‘optimal’ diets for healthy aging Study of visceral, subcutaneous, liver and pancreas fat changes after 12 weeks, Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice (2023) MRI assessment of adipose tissue fatty acid composition, Obesity (2024) Phenotyping, Body Composition, and Precision Nutrition (2024) Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here. Episode transcripts are available here.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to Zoe, Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  In the loud hum of an MRI scanner, a human body becomes transparent and everything changes. What matters is no longer your shape or weight, or even what you see in the mirror, but a layered landscape of tissues and organs that shape your health. And somewhere in that unseen landscape lies a kind of fat that most people never think about. It doesn't jiggle, it may not even show, but it wraps itself around vital organs in your belly, quietly shaping metabolism, inflammation and long-term health. This is visceral fat, and it may be one of the most misunderstood biological forces in human health. We've all been taught a simple story:

• 0:58Speaker 00

  fat is bad, less is better, and thin equals healthy. But what if that story is incomplete? Why can two people with identical body weights have dramatically different health outcomes? What if someone can look thin on the outside, yet carry significant metabolic risk within? And most shockingly, what if losing weight doesn't automatically mean improving your health? Why does the body choose to store fat in different places? And what can you do to change this?

• 1:29Speaker 00

  To help unravel all these questions, I'm joined by Jimmy Bell, Professor of Molecular Imaging and Metabolism at the University of Westminster, pioneer of MRI-based visceral fat research, and a leading expert on the biological importance of body fat. By the end of this conversation, you'll have an entirely new understanding of body fat: how to distinguish harmless from harmful fat, how fat can shake your body's inflammation, why measuring BMI is misleading, and specific ways to reduce visceral fat around your belly through diet, exercise and behavioural changes.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  Jimmy, if I manage to have very low levels of body fat, would I be healthier?

• 2:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  Could supermodels have more visceral fat than a normal person?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Yes, they could.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  If I have too much visceral fat in my belly, could it reduce my life expectancy?

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  Is cardio exercise the best exercise to reduce visceral fat?

• 2:32Speaker 01

  All exercises help to reduce fat.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Can fat tissue in my body influence my mental health?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Can more visceral fat increase the inflammation in my body?

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Yes and no.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  What is the most common myth that you hear about body fat?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  That all fat in your body is bad. You just have to know how to treat it.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  So I spent, you know, the first 35 years of my life being told I was thin, and that all changed when we did our first big study at Zoe of a thousand twins. And I got to be a participant in this study. And as part of the study, I had a full-body DEXA scan to measure my body fat and where it was distributed. And I will never forget this experience. So the nurse is doing this scan, and she actually stopped and double-checked the results. Because there I was, you know, on the table with very little visible fat on my arms, my legs, but it turns out that I had lots of fat wrapped around the organs in my belly, which is called visceral fat. And I was told that I was a toffee,

• 3:41Speaker 00

  thin on the outside, fat on the inside, and that being a toffee was going to be very bad for my health. And this was pretty scary and was probably the big aha moment for me personally that caused me to take my own diet seriously. And it's exciting for me, Jimmy, that you're here today because you're the scientist who invented this term toffee as a result of your research into the biology of body fat. And it turns out that, you know, most of the things that I understood about fat were just wrong. So maybe we could start with why it matters where in the body you store fat for your health? And indeed, where is fat stored in your body?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we should step back a bit and start talking about body fat, which is adipose tissue. And adipose tissue is an organ, so it has many components. And you have to think that those components that make up the organ have very distinct anatomical and metabolic characteristics. And it's very important where that fat is in relation to your health. So you can unpack adipose tissue into many fat depots. So the most common one, you know, is the one which is outside your body, which is mainly circadian adipose tissue. And then there's internal fat like visceral fat.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  Adipose tissue for me just means body fat. And so where are the normal places that this is stored in my body?

• 5:05Speaker 01

  External part, which is called circadian adipose tissue. And then internally, the main one being the visceral fat of visceral adipose tissue.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  And so if you're going to tell me where in my body or a listener's body fat is being stored on that external place, where does it mainly end up?

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Anywhere between your neck and your toes. You're going to find fat depots that are going to have different metabolic effects. So you have fat around your heart, fat inside your liver, fat inside your pancreas, fat around your kidneys and inside the kidneys. You're going to have things, fat around your prostate, fat streaking your muscle. You'll have fat around your, all your organs in the abdomen, which is called visceral fat. And each one has a slightly different risk assessment when it comes to cardiovascular problems.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  You're talking now about the fat that's stored sort of inside my chest and torso. Is that where most of the fat in my body is stored?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  No, most of your fat is stored externally, which tend to be metabolically less active than the internal fat. So you could think of your external fat as a bathysone, especially if you're going around your hips and your thigh, and the internal fat being more metabolically active and more of a risk factor for conditions like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and so forth.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  I feel like men and women tend to store fat differently. Is that right?

• 6:37Speaker 01

  We all store the fat in the same places. It's just the levels and difference. So there's a whole monogenetic component to this. So men tend to deposit their fat more internally than women. If you look at two males and females and look at the identical BMI, you'll find that the male will have far more visceral fat than a female. But a female will have more external fat than the male.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Men are having it more, the visceral is what we're describing, sort of all around my belly and there. Where do women tend to distribute their fat?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Externally around their hips and their bottom.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Okay, so this difference is sort of true.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, this whole thing about one minute in the lip, a lifetime in the hips is actually unfortunately true for females.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  And for a man, you're saying it's a minute on the lips and then a lifetime around my belly?

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  And if you could choose where to store the fat to make sure that it was as healthy as possible, where would you put it?

• 7:33Speaker 01

  I would become a sumo wrestler and have most of my fat externally.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Got it. And does it matter where it is externally in terms of the health impact?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Abdominally, it's lesser bathysone than, say, your hip and your buttocks. So that's a much more protective, while the central part can be, especially it depends on ethnicity and this ethnic issue as well, where this circadian fat can be proactive in terms of risk.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  So I think what you're saying is that where women tend to lay down the fat, which is sort of hips, thighs, bum, that's actually healthier than where men tend to lay down their fat, which tends to be in this sort of visceral fat around.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, nature was not very kind to men, I'm afraid.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Do we have any idea why men and women lay down fat differently?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  That's interesting. There have been lots of speculation in there. One is for mono, and you see that in menopause. As the women go into menopause, they start getting more and more male fat distribution than a female fat distribution. It might be just a dynamic thing. So if you're a hunter-gatherer, people suppose that it's better to have your fat centrally. So, you know, your central gravity is always in the right place. And in the hips for women is because it, fat storage is basically at the end of this. Energy is your storage for long-term survival, you know, maternity and so forth. Then it makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. In a modern world, of course, it doesn't make sense at all.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  So you're saying that as a woman, because I'm going to get pregnant and have a baby and need to breastfeed and things like, I need to store this fat?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  In the wilderness.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  In the wilderness, because I won't be able to go down to the supermarket and get some food?

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  I just want to follow up on something else you said, which is that as you go through menopause, your fat distribution shifts and becomes more like the male fat distribution. What would that mean in terms of where my fat was before and where it ends up going afterwards?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  For women, it means that I start getting more central fat, so away from the hips and more around the visceral area, around the organs and around their abdomen.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  And so that could happen even if your weight was fairly stable?

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  It's actually like a redistribution of what's going on?

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. What we find is that people who keep stable weight, keeping the fat and losing the muscle. So their weight stays the same, but the ratio between fat and muscle gets worse and worse and worse.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  And so that's also true for everybody as we get older? Even if your weight is stable, potentially you're losing muscle and gaining fat?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  And you're also, as a woman, seeing this fat distribution shift from somewhere that you said was really healthy to somewhere that is less healthy? I asked the question about the healthiest place to put the fat. What are the worst places to store it? I'll never forget the moment that everything shifted for me. I was at a public talk on nutrition, listening to a speaker explain that my gut had trillions of microbes in it and that these bugs shaped every aspect of my health. That speaker was Professor Tim Spector, one of the world's top 100 scientists, who became my co-founder here at Zoe. Nine years later, Zoe runs the world's largest gut health research study, and the conclusion is simple: gut health is health. How you feel, your long-term health and your digestion are all shaped by the state of

• 11:01Speaker 00

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• 11:45Speaker 00

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• 11:59Speaker 01

  So in a pecking order, if you like a pecking order, I would start visceral fat, then liver fat, pancreas fat, and then what we call IMAT, which is the intermuscular fat. So that's the fat that streaks across your muscle. All those fat are independently risk factors for type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, metabolic diseases. The main two culprits at the moment are seen visceral fat and liver, which are interlinked, there's an axis between visceral fat, pancreatic fat, and liver fat. And lately, it's become very clear that the amount of fat that you deposit in your muscle can be very, very detrimental, especially as you grow older.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  When you started to differentiate between visceral fat and liver fat, I'm like, you know what, I'm a bit vague really about what's really going on inside my body. Could you help me to understand a bit more what visceral fat there for means?

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, we call visceral fat in general, it's a fat inside your body, around the organs in your abdomen, anywhere from the top of your liver down to your hips. And if it's inside, it's generally called abdominal fat or visceral fat.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Got it. And so I think historically, I've tended to think about belly fat as being an aesthetic issue, but actually that belly fat, which we think about as being aesthetic, you know, your research is saying that this really matters about health.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  So can we go back to that term toffee that I learned about during my own scan? Because I had never heard of it before. What does it mean and why is it possible that you can look thin on the outside but be fat on the inside?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  So initially, we used to do measurements of body composition indirectly. So we use a tape measure, we have calipers to measure the thickness of a fat, and the water weighing, so you put someone in a swimming pool and see how much it displays, and work out density and so forth. When imaging came along, especially CT and MRI, we realized that we can start looking inside people's body. And we discovered, so this with one of our colleagues, Gary Froster in Imperial College, who said, look, I got people with identical BMI, identical body composition by all these measurements, but the insulin sensitivity is completely different. What happens if you scan them?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  And we scanned them, and one of them has no internal fat, and the other one had lots of internal fat. I said, that's your answer.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  They look the same on the outside.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely. They had the same BMI, same age, same ethnicity, everything was same.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  And BMI is basically sort of their weight compared to their height. It's like a traditional measure of whether you're thin or fat.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  And so they look exactly the same, they're the same on all of these traditional medical ways to judge your health.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  But metabolically, metabolically, they were different.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  And you were saying one of them was really not in good shape metabolically?

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the other one was. It may not sense. So when we scanned them, one had lots of internal fat. And then we started looking at this, oh yeah, this is happening. And then we started seeing that there was a small percentage, including myself, that actually we had the normal, healthy BMI, but the amount of fat internally was disproportionate to the amount of external fat. We used to have this very long word to describe it, first someone came out with the toffee. It was one of the reporters who actually said, oh, you mean thin outside, fat inside? We went, oh yeah, okay, yes.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  Well, you get all the credit for it now, Jamie.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, I know, but I have to give credit to people. Scientists are not very good at transmitting our findings.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  And do we have any idea why it is that you could end up as this toffee?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  I think it's mainly because lifestyle choices. At the time, there was a lot of emphasis on diet, and for a long time, being just diet and maintain your weight, and it was all about weight, not the quality of the weight, just the weight. So if you tend to maintain your weight mainly through dieting, you end up having the wrong body composition. Because as you put weight on, you put a disproportionate amount of fat on, the very little muscle. So your ratio of fat to muscle gets more and more detrimental. And this is why you end up with a situation where you might maintain the right weight but the wrong composition. This has not happened if you maintain your weight with exercise.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  The thing that, to me, seems most surprising is I've always thought about fat as it's just a way to store calories for later use, you know, like a bear getting ready for hibernation, you know, it's eating all the salmon, it gets really fat, it goes away and like hides in a cave, and slowly it depletes the fat. And that's the only thing it does. So it's like completely dormant way to store energy. Is that correct?

• 16:54Speaker 01

  That was the thought until about 20, 30 years ago. This was all changed when they discovered that adipose tissue creates molecules, one of them, the most famous being leptin, that affect your appetite. And bit by bit, people transferred the adipose tissue from a tissue, which is very passive, to an organ, which is a very active component of your body. And now adipose tissue is your friend that tells you about the outside and it tells you about the inside of your body. External is telling you about food and energy availability. Internally, it's telling you about moods, about your biological status and so forth.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  That's why people who tend to be large tend to be happier, yeah? Because it's that balance that you have to find between having enough energy without creating metabolic problems. You could think adipose tissue as a brain, and it's actually all the time aware of what is happening to your body, okay, internally, in terms of energy, in terms of inflammation, in terms of all the processes happening inside your body, yeah? And it's responding to that. If the energy is too low internally, let's release fat. If it's too much, I'll store some. If there's inflammation, I will release some chemicals. If it's too little, I will release the right energy so those chemicals can be produced. And at the same time, it's very aware of the outside.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  If there's no food, let's store it very quickly because we might need it long term. So, you know, it's protecting you from bumping into things, and if it's too cold, if it's too hot. So it's a very dynamic system. It's a friend that might love you a bit too much when you love it too much.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  That's a bit the way that I feel about ice cream. You said something about how it could affect your mood. Could you help me to understand that and something to do with being happy?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so one, adipose tissue affects your appetite, but also the inflammatory markers, inflammatory chemicals, okay, that the adipose tissue is actually reacting to. And that the inflammation, okay, affects your, your brain function. This has been shown already. So when you put weight on and you become obese, you get subclinical inflammation. So it's not inflammation, you're getting arthritis, but just much lower, yeah? And that is affecting your mood. So it's like, if you receive an injury, if an animal is injured, okay, you get a massive inflammatory response to repair that injury, yeah?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  And animals can't sit in a corner until they get better. When you become obese, you don't get that kind of massive inflammatory process, but much lower. So you still feel like you're injured, but you're not quite injured.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  It's all the fat in your body is actually sending out these inflammation markers?

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Especially your visceral fat and your sacropters fat, but the visceral fat is quite central. So when you get a combination between inflammation and visceral fat, that is a very bad combination.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  So this visceral fat around my belly, if I've got lots of that, it's not just sitting there doing nothing, it's actually sending out inflammatory signals to the rest of my body? And if I've got a lot of it, it's like sort of always on pumping out this inflammation?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  And on top of the inflammatory cells come to the visceral fat and makes you even more excited. So it becomes a vicious circle.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  So also, if I have other inflammation, which I might well do in our modern world, how do your fat cells respond if that inflammation is going on?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  The mechanisms are not clear at the moment, but clearly they start pumping out more inflammatory signals. So it becomes a vicious circle, which attracts more inflammatory cells.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  So my inflammation is up, and then if I have a bunch of this visceral fat, it then pushes out more inflammation, and then the rest of my body goes, oh, the inflammation is worse, and it's sort of...

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  It's a vicious circle.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  And it tells you, go and sit in the corner until you get better, but of course, you're not going to get better because you're obese.

• 21:01Speaker 00

  So talk to me about the sitting in the corner. How does this tie to my mood that you were describing?

• 21:07Speaker 01

  If an animal is injured, yeah, you'll see they become very passive, or they sit in the corner, until that injury gets resolved. And what are the signals to tell it to calm down and sit in the corner and just kind of, you know, is the inflammatory signals. But when you go obesity, you go to inflammatory signals without the injury. So your body is telling you, look, there's inflammation. Uh, you should be more passive and it will resolve this problem. But that problem is not going to resolve because you're not curing an injury or a wound. You just got this subclinical levels of inflammation that affecting the way you're going to behave.

• 21:48Speaker 00

  How will this make me feel?

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Less likely to do, become active. It's a very open question at the moment, the whole area of how moods and behaviours are affected by adipose tissue. But it's definitely is affected.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  One of the things we see a lot through like the gut health research we do at Zoe is the way in which like improving your gut health has this really positive impact on mood and energy, like very dramatic and quite fast. Are these a similar sort of like self purported feelings that you would associate with this sort of excess of visceral fat?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And if you resolve that, you resolve the problem. So you resolve the problem visceral fat, having too much and having inflamed. Yeah, you will resolve lots of the problem at the same time. But the body is telling you, don't do anything until we resolve the problem. But the problem is, yeah, the problem itself, if that makes sense.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  It does make sense. So it sounds pretty clear. You don't want to have too much visceral fat and I guess not too much fat overall. Wouldn't I be better off in today's world having almost no body fat? Because after all, I can always go to the supermarket and buy more food. So I don't need to have it stored in the same way that our ancestors. So shouldn't I be aiming for almost no body fat?

• 23:14Speaker 01

  If you think of body fat simply as a dumping ground for excess energy. But we already established that it is an organ, it has other functions. It has function in fertility, has function in your moods, the way your immune system works. So if you don't have any adipose tissue, there are conditions called lipodystrophy, genetic condition where people have almost no fat because of genetic reasons. They end up having type two diabetes. So you end up with having no fat and all the problem of obesity.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Oh, so you could be, you can have so little fat that it's really unhealthy?

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Because the fat has to go, there's fat in your diet. You can't get away from fat. Okay, it's, it's, it's, everything you eat has small amount of fat in it, large or small amount of fat. That has to be stored somewhere. So if you don't have adipose tissue, it will be stored inside your liver, inside your pancreas, inside your muscle, in all the wrong places, the worst places that you can think of. So that's why adipose tissue is your friend. Yeah, I said, okay, I'll store away that excess in a good place. But if you do overdo it, I have to put it somewhere.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  And in your view, Jimmy, because this is your area of research, do you feel that this adipose tissue, this like storage of fat? Is it doing any positive things for us now that we understand it's more like an organ that's active or is it only sort of a risk of danger if it's in the wrong place or there's too much?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Everything that the fat does is good. One, store energy, maintain your immune system. So if you, if you get an infection, adipose tissue is there working for you to stop that. If you get wounded, okay, adipose tissue is there giving you the chemicals to repair the wound. Uh, it's keeping you warm, it's keeping your mood up, you know, it's doing lots of good things.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  I'm thinking about this sumo wrestlers and supermodels at the other end. Supermodels obviously famous for like having almost no body fat.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  No, no, no. They're famous for being very thin.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Nobody has done a really full study of their body composition. We tried to do this and unfortunately I made the mistake of telling them what I was trying to show, that their body composition was not healthy. You see, models as far as I understand, not that I know any supermodel, they are not allowed to have any muscle delineation. Therefore, they are not allowed to actually exercise because otherwise you can see, they have to be smooth. Ah, the stupidity of the, the industry. The only way you can achieve that is through dieting. And when you lose weight, you lose muscle as well. So in the supermodel, we got no idea what the body composition is.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  But what is your guess?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  My guess is that it's not very healthy.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  So your guess is they do have fat, but only sort of this visceral fat around their organs?

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and probably in the liver as well. The two models that we managed to scan, they did not have a very healthy body composition. They had too much fat in their body, even though they look very thin.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  And how does that compare with a sumo wrestler? They seem like the definition of incredibly unhealthy because they've got this enormous amount of fat folding over them. So I would assume that they are like vastly less healthy than a supermodel.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  I, I follow sumo wrestlers, but they, they do six to eight hours of exercise. And in Japan, through, you know, decades or hundreds of years of trial and error, they come out with a regime, okay, that they accumulate fat, but most of the fat accumulated externally. So you see them really large. When you actually, they are done CT scans of sumo wrestlers, the amount of visceral fat is very low, extremely low, surprisingly low.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  And so they have been scanned.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  And so potentially a supermodel might have more visceral fat than a sumo wrestler?

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Could be. We're talking about Japanese sumo wrestler because there are lots of Western sumo wrestlers that they don't follow the same regime. And they're very large and those people are not exactly what I would call a sumo wrestler. If you look at a sumo wrestler in detail, they've got huge thighs. Huge thighs means lots of muscle, good quality muscle. And that's another important thing.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  So why is it that we accumulate fat around our organs if it's so unhealthy? Because you'd think our body would know that and wouldn't lay down fat in these bad places when it's got perfectly good places. I'm looking at my legs and my arms and thinking, you know, my butt, why can't it put the fat there?

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Okay, so imagine you are designing a system and you think, okay, I got two functions that I have to do. One, store excess energy. And you say, okay, I'll put it outside because when I need a, it's a slow process. I put it outside, it also protect me from the cold and bumping around into things and whatever. Then I need another dynamic system where I need it for my inflammatory responses, infections. Most people, uh, you know, thousand years ago, used to die from infections. Okay, well, your adipose tissue and your visceral fat is quite key for inflammatory responses to infections. So that's why you put it there. Yeah, of course, in modern world, you just take antibiotics and that's that.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  So you would put some fat inside your organs in order to support your immune system really fast?

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Around your, around your.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  Around your organs. So it's actually literally to support somehow like the.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  The inflammatory processes that you need for infections and.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  So there's a bit that's around these organs that I can get to very fast to support my immune system to fight um, some sort of infection?

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Your visceral fat is metabolic, very dynamic, dynamic. So it responds very quickly in comparison to your secretinous fat.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  And what does respond quickly mean?

• 29:04Speaker 01

  In terms, it doesn't have to have lots of signals, it responds to immediately. So there is an infection, inflammatory cells require fat, they require signals, okay? It responds immediately.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  So it's sort of like I can access it very, very fast, is that what you're saying? So there's visceral fat and theory I can pull out really fast.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but your secretinous fat doesn't.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  So that takes time to pull down.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Especially if you're around your hip. Okay, it take even longer to respond.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  And so the idea is I'm storing that, this is sort of like my, um, like my immediately available petrol tank for this. But your expectation is you'll sort of run that down quite fast, which I guess these days that's not what happens and it just sits there for years slowly growing?

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's very responsive because if you do diet, one of the, the fat deposit that decreases the most, okay, is the visceral fat because it's very responsive, the same with exercise, the same with liver fat. So they all have their, their reasons, just too much is the problem. Too much with inflammation on top of that is a bigger problem. Then the composition of the fat is also important.

• 30:11Speaker 00

  What do you mean by that?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  So whether it's saturated fat or unsaturated fat, that in itself is a risk factor.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  So our body can lay down different types of fat?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:22Speaker 00

  Could you explain that to us?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  So, well, it reflects very much your diet. So if you eat lots of saturated fat, you know, if you go to McDonald's and eat lots of fatty food, you know, with saturated, that's what your body's gonna look like. We can measure the amount of saturated fat or unsaturated fat. You want to have as much unsaturated fat as possible. So if you look at vegans who tend to eat a healthier diet with lots of unsaturated fat, even though the amount of fat is the same, the composition of the fat is different.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  And is it the composition that's more important?

• 30:56Speaker 01

  No, no, it's the amount, the distribution and the composition.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Got it, but what you're saying, let me just understand that. If I eat lots and lots of red meat, then actually slowly my body sort of resembles the kebab or the burgers that I eat. But on the other hand, if I am eating lots of avocados, then actually the fat, I look more like an avocado inside me.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. Well, all your fat, not only inside, all your fat.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  All my fat, so your body actually reflects the type of fats?

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Even the fat in the bone marrow, it reflects your diet. And that is a risk factor in itself. So it compounds, so if you have visceral fat that is very saturated, it's worse than having visceral fat that is unsaturated.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  So eating a really fatty piece of meat is likely to be worse than than like a lean piece of meat because I'm just gonna take that fat from, you know, the cow or whatever. And my body's like, great, that's what we're gonna be laying down around your liver tomorrow.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you have olive oil, okay, and the same amount of sunflower oil, then the olive oil is gonna be much better because that's what is gonna reflect in your body. And when the immune response occurs, okay, the immune response needs lots of polyunsaturated fat, it doesn't need the saturated fat. That's the first thing that gets moved by the body is the unsaturated fat because it's essential for the immune response. And if you go trans fat, that's even worse because you can't move it at all. So you could see the complexity of this organ.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  So let's say someone is listening to this and they're like, you know, I've been thinking about changing my diet for a long time. I know I'm eating way too much like red meat and bacon and all these sorts of things. And I wanna switch towards like a sort of Zoe style diet that's much higher in plants and healthier fats. Will the fat in my body turn over or is it all too late? And how long does it take?

• 32:59Speaker 01

  So a Swedish group from the Karolinska infirmary did a beautiful study and where they showed and they measured the turnover of adipose tissue. And it takes between two and three years, okay, to turn over your adipose tissue. So your fat will take between two and three years. So if you change your diet now, it sounds depressing, but it's not. That it'll take you about two to three years, okay, to change from a saturated meat looking person to unsaturated avocado looking person. In biology, everything takes time, you know, I always say, nobody goes to bed thin and wakes up in the morning overweight, okay? It's a long process. Your body didn't become saturated, okay, overnight. It's a long process.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  There's almost like two benefits here, it sounds like. One is you're gonna lose the visceral fat and that's gonna be healthier for you, is that correct?

• 33:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  But then the second thing is you actually would like to change the composition of your visceral fat, so it's not just the amount.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  There was this amazing study published a couple of years ago, looking at improvements in years of life, if you switch from like the standard poor quality diet in America or the UK to sort of a high quality diet. And the thing that like stuck in my mind the most is you could be like 70 years old and you could switch to a high quality diet and you could live for like another six or seven years, which is sort of crazy. But now I'm listening to this, is this the sort of thing that can explain that? Because you're actually like after a year or two, like your whole body fat is turned over to something much healthier?

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely, yes. It's a part of this. When people lose weight through dieting, if that's what they're gonna do, it's not well recommended, but they should not only reduce the amount of calories that they take in, but also the type of calories, because you get double benefit. You lose the weight and you change the composition of the adipose tissue, which will help dampen down your inflammatory responses, it will improve your inflammatory responses. And with that, that may things, you know, inflammation is a massive thing, you know, beyond my own expertise, but something quite important to keep an eye on.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  There's obviously an enormous interest in weight loss drugs at the moment and sort of dieting and yo-yo dieting. If I start taking like these GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic or Wegovy, do we know what that does to our visceral fat as opposed to, we know it reduces our overall fat?

• 35:33Speaker 01

  I find GLP-1 agonists an amazing drug. I mean, they work, they work, you know, they don't work for everyone and the mechanism is still unclear, at least for me, but they work very effectively. So the discussion then became, what's a weight do you lose? If you diet and you take GLP-1, do you end up with the same body composition at the end? And this is the big open question. So visceral fat drops because if you lose weight in any form, visceral fat, liver fat, okay, drop, that the first fat deposit that you're gonna see dropping. Second, the quality of your muscle, in the sense of how much fat you have streaking

• 36:18Speaker 01

  across your muscle, also decreases, which is also a positive thing. And we haven't spoken about the value of having lost muscle and the quality of muscle. So it's not only amount of muscle, but the quality of that muscle. Now there is a discussion as to how much muscle you lose when you diet. So if you do diet alone, you decrease, say, your intake of calorie by 50%, you lose fat, but you also lose muscle. Yeah, so you don't end up in a good place, yeah, if you don't do any exercise. In the GLP-1 agonist treatment, we don't know how much muscle people are losing. The literature is quite contradictory, but there hasn't been a proper study, at least published study.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  It might be that the pharma companies are doing these studies, I don't know, again, I'm not privy to that, but we don't know how much muscle and the quality of the muscle they're losing. And this is worrying because if there is an excess of muscle being lost, not only fat, but excess of muscle in comparison to how much fat you're losing. So if you are losing the wrong amount of muscle and the wrong type of muscle, yeah, you might be creating in future a pandemic of, you know, sarcopenia and all related conditions.

• 37:35Speaker 00

  And so this is back to a little bit of your supermodel conversation, isn't it? Where I've clearly lost weight on the outside, potentially on the inside, I've still got like these pools of fat in these really dangerous places, this visceral fat. And I've just lost a lot of muscle that I don't see. So we might look at someone and say, hey, you look great, but actually, you know, if I had the scan in my eyes, I'd see, oh, you've lost a lot of muscle and so you need to do something around that at the same time as you're losing weight.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. To be fair to the, which I'm never fair to a pharma company, but would be fair to, they do say that people that take GLP-1, they should include exercise as part of their lifestyle recommendation. And I think this is important, and this is important in any way that you lose weight.

• 38:25Speaker 00

  I was going to ask actually, Jimmy, what about people who have been doing this sort of yo-yo dieting in the past, which is incredibly common? In fact, it's been promoted really by our culture. So, you know, you do a crash diet, you lose some weight, you put it back on, you do a crash diet and repeat it. What does that do to like my visceral fat and my body composition?

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Well, what it does is, and I think that's why I want to bring skeletal muscle into the conversation, because muscle can work as a counter to some of the problems that adipose tissue. So when people diet, okay, okay, they lose fat, but they also lose muscle. So the ratio fat to muscle becomes worse. When you put weight on, that ratio becomes even worse. So you have too much fat, very little muscle. You lose weight again, that ratio gets even worse. So as you yo-yo, your fat to muscle ratio becomes worse and worse and worse. So the recommendation should be that if you lose weight in any form or shape, you should

• 39:28Speaker 01

  do exercise because you lose weight, but you put back that muscle. So you might end up with the same weight that you want to achieve, but the composition will be the proper composition.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  The muscle is actively beneficial?

• 39:42Speaker 01

  The muscle is absorbing lots of the sugars, you know, it's metabolizing it. Beside the mechanical need for walking and so forth, especially as you're older, it also sending signals in the rest of the body. So muscle now is producing lots of signals and we detect the signal that change the metabolism around your body. So when you exercise, you're not only just burning fat and growing muscle, but you're sending signals around that change your mood, change your immune response, change your metabolism. But it's not only the amount of muscle, but it's the quality of that muscle. So you can have lots of muscle, but with lots of fat infiltration, that's no good muscle.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  And what I'm taking away from this conversation is that, you know, if you're someone who's been a yo-yo dieter in the past, if we were gonna go and sort of do that scan between you and maybe, you know, how you might have been 10 years before, even if you had the same weight, actually you're gonna probably have more visceral fat and overall you're gonna have more fat and less muscle than someone who's never been through this like cycles of weight loss and weight gain and weight loss and weight gain.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  People who maintain their weight, okay, through diet throughout their life, their body composition is getting worse and worse, even though the body, their body weight stays the same.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  If someone in your life is focused on losing weight and has spent years bouncing from one diet to the next, send them this episode. Might help them realise that improving health isn't always about getting lighter. Sometimes it's about nurturing the right kind of fat.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  So I'd love to move now to, okay, what can you do about this? How can I reduce my visceral fat? But I'm also thinking that, you know, I got this scan that actually told me, wow, you've really got this visceral fat. But most people have never had a scan like that. So if someone starts by saying, well, I want to know how much of a problem this is, you know, is for example, measuring their BMI a good way to start to figure this out?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Yes and no. So if you're overweight and obese, it's highly likely, and you don't do any physical activity, as such, or exercise, it's highly likely you've got very high levels of visceral fat, liver fat, pancreas fat, and lots of fat in your muscle.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  And what about the reverse? Let's say you're listening to this and, you know, the doctors haven't been telling you that you're overweight, but now they're listening to this and thinking, oh, well, actually, maybe I do have the visceral fat, which was absolutely in my situation a few years ago. Is there any way, like from your own lifestyle or anything else that you could?

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Okay, so if you have a large BMI, it's almost guaranteed that you have lots of visceral liver and pancreatic fat and muscle fat. If you're thin, normal BMI, there's no guarantee that you don't have lots of visceral fat, liver fat, pancreas fat, muscle fat. Now, if you're thin and your lifestyle includes a balanced diet and significant amount of physical activity, it's highly likely that you have the right levels of fat distributed around your body. So that's almost guaranteed. If you maintain your weight through dieting alone, it's highly likely you've got lots of visceral fat and liver fat.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  I almost can guarantee it.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Let's talk about what you can do about it. Let's say you're listening to this and you're like, I'm worried about the visceral fat. I want to reduce it. Other than like medication to reduce your weight, we talked about GLP once, you said that will reduce your visceral fat along with everything else. What can people do? I'll never forget the moment that everything shifted for me. I was at a public talk on nutrition, listening to a speaker explain that my gut had trillions of microbes in it and that these bugs shaped every aspect of my health. That speaker was Professor Tim Spector, one of the world's top 100 scientists, who became my co-founder here at Zoe. Nine years later, Zoe runs the world's largest gut health research study. And the conclusion is simple. Gut health is health.

• 43:55Speaker 00

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• 44:39Speaker 00

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• 44:58Speaker 01

  I'm not going to comment about diet. I'm not an expert on diet, but clearly there are lots of advice on dietary intake, amount of energy. But I think if you're overweight and you go into a dietary regime or reduce calorie intake, improve the quality of that diet, of that energy that you're taking and add exercise. So the weight loss will lead to a reduction of visceral fat and liver fat and so forth. If you have stable weight, okay, diet will have very little impact on the amount of visceral fat. It will come down to physical activity. Go to a gym to build your muscles, so resistant exercise appears to be a very important component of this.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  And you have to get out of breath when you do physical activity, yeah, to start burning that fat. Because when the body start burning that excess fat, the first areas that will go to pick up that fat, to burn it, will be in the liver, will be in the visceral area, will be in the pancreas. And we and other groups have shown this over and over again. And long walks, not just talking to your friend, which is good, okay? But you have to get out of breath, walk fast. So the speed becomes actually quite important. Yeah. And it's shown that if you get out of breath when you're walking, I'm not talking about protein, I'm not talking about running, I'm talking just taking that pace up a bit, okay? That you'll get all the benefits of walking and more.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  So what you're saying is that when I start to do exercise at a certain level of intensity, then it's like pulling this visceral fat out?

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pulling, you need energy. When you do exercise, you need energy, you have to take it from somewhere. And the first place after the sugar will be the fat. And the first place it will come out will be the visceral fat and the liver fat, all the bad deposits. Because it's a very mobile metabolic, very active depot. And when you exercise, your process doesn't stop when you stop exercising. The effects carry on for hours, you know, days. And this has shown that your metabolism changes, yeah, days after. This is not the work that we have done by other people, actually shown that the metabolism is altered very quickly. What exercise would I do will be resistant exercise because two, you're not only burning

• 47:21Speaker 01

  fat, but you build a muscle. And again, we must look at fat in isolation. It's part of a bigger system. And there's the counterpoints, which are called skeletal muscle. So if you build good quality muscle, it will counter some of the detrimental part of the other fat. And we see this in the sumo wrestlers. So if you have to do some exercise, resistant exercise will be, especially if you're older, because you're building muscle. Aerobic exercise will give you all the benefits, you know, your respiration, the way you breathe and so forth. You'll feel fit and it'll give you a high.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  Can I ask about now about this sort of nutrition exercise trade-off? Because I think that, you know, many people that I meet talk about, you know, any form of weight loss as being sort of 80% your diet and 20% your exercise. And that despite like all the discussions about exercise driving weight loss, like the evidence says that isn't really true. It's great for your health, but it doesn't lead that. It sounds like though, when you're talking about the visceral fat and the impact on my health, that you're weighting the exercise much more?

• 48:33Speaker 01

  People are obsessed with weight. Yeah. They're not obsessed with health. And this is the problem. And we did a study where we had 20 or 30 women and we put them through lots of exercise and diets, whatever. And metabolically, they all became really healthy and body composition, they all became very healthy. They all complained that they still look the same. If you want to lose weight really quickly, diet. And you're going to end up with the weight that you require. Are you going to be healthier? Yes, that in comparison to where you started from, if you were overweight or obese, of course you're going to be healthier. But if you diet and you did exercise at the same time, you're going to end up with the same weight and a much healthier profile. And this is the thing.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  So it's not exercise and it's not diet, it's a balance between the two. So you cannot eat yourself out of a gym, but you cannot exercise yourself out of a bad diet.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  So I'm thinking now about food and I think we've already talked quite a bit about how the type of fats in your diet really affect the type of fat in your body and that has this impact on your health in a similar way that you're saying, well, avoid this sort of unhealthy, you know, saturated fat from certain sources. Is there anything else that we should be sort of avoiding in particular that is sort of directly sort of linked to this visceral fat buildup?

• 50:02Speaker 01

  I think the big umbrella that covers this whole thing is inflammation and your immune system. So diet that will lead to an increase in inflammation or inflammation response, then that's a really bad combination if you've got lots of visceral fat. These are two brothers that get together and they just mess around with your metabolism.

• 50:25Speaker 00

  So like I'm eating food, the increase in my inflammation?

• 50:28Speaker 01

  That will trigger the visceral fat to be inflamed. It responds, oh, we're inflamed, okay, let's all get inflamed, okay? And then, yeah, you're inflamed, I'm inflamed, let's all get inflamed. And it becomes a vicious circle that you want to avoid. So by having the right amount and the right composition of visceral fat, but then the diet that doesn't trigger further inflammation, yeah, it becomes important. So it's not only about the composition, so there are things.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  What about alcohol? In my mind, this sort of beer belly, you know, I have this sort of direct link between particularly like beer and having this sort of massive visceral fat. Is there anything in this?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Yes, any amount of alcohol is bad for you. That's it. I know that the French say that you take red wine, they've in this correlation and so forth. But it's not the alcohol per se, it's all the components. You could take those components without having to have the red wine to get the benefit. In moderate amount of alcohol, it's not bad for you. I mean, it's not terrible. Okay, so moderation, the Chinese have been saying this for about 10,000 years. Everything in moderation will be okay. Alcohol in moderation. People don't drink alcohol in moderation. Yeah, so you go the energy intake and then the alcohol have detrimental effect, especially in your liver. Increases inflammation, we are back to inflammation, the whole process of sub clinically level inflammation and so forth.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  So in your view, the alcohol, it's not just the calories in the beer.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 51:54Speaker 00

  The alcohol is having an effect that leads to more of this visceral.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you already have a problem and then you hit it with another problem that triggers a massive response. So if you're very healthy and you drink a beer of alcohol, that's fine. But most people who drink alcohol, they're already unhealthy. Too much visceral fat, too much fat in their liver, too many toxins in their bodies. And then on top of that, they hit them with alcohol. The alcohol is creating damage in your liver and all the organs. Okay, that triggers lots of free radicals, it's aging you faster.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  So if someone's been listening to this and they found the whole story really compelling, Jimmy, and so they start to eat better, they start to exercise more, just as you're describing. How quickly can they lose this visceral fat that you're talking about that has, you know, so much detrimental impact on their health?

• 52:48Speaker 01

  We have done intervention studies where we show within 12 weeks, you can see a significant change in liver fat, visceral fat, pancreas fat.

• 52:56Speaker 00

  Within 12 weeks?

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  And that's not some totally crazy crash diet?

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Uh, no, no, it was, uh, well, it was a significant reduction of calorie intake and the quality taken.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  This is in 12 weeks, you can have a significant improvement in your visceral fat.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  It was actually like a very short period of time that you're saying, and that would have really like meaningful improvements in your health?

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, in your metabolic profile, absolutely.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Amazing. Final question, Jimmy. If someone was listening to this and they want to want to improve their long-term health, what's the one thing that you would recommend they start doing today out of the, you know, the many things we've talked about? What would be the most important thing you'd suggest they should do?

• 53:44Speaker 01

  It depends on the starting point. So I would say look at your diet and look at your resistance exercise. If you just include that in your day to day, control the quality of your diet, you can have a massive impact, both on the composition of your body and the quality of the body.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  Jimmy, I think that's really clear. I'd like to try and do a quick summary. The thing that really stick in my head right now is this image of sort of the supermodels on one side and the sumo wrestlers on the other. It seems really obvious that, you know, the supermodels have no fat, but actually, if the supermodels don't do any exercise, if you were to scan them and understand the visceral fat, there's fat around their bellies, you could actually find that the supermodels are worse than the sumo wrestlers, which I find extraordinary. And that's a problem because this visceral fat is really important for your health. And fat isn't just this sort of store of energy that has no impact on our body.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  We now understand it's this sort of organ which responds to inflammation in our body by then producing more inflammation if that happens, which can then lead to more fat. And that's particularly true if it's your visceral fat around your organs, it's all much more active. And so given that we live in this environment where in general we have this high sort of background level of inflammation, you then have this fat and you're in a sort of vicious spiral, which is why having lots of visceral fat is really bad for your, your long-term health. If you're listening to this and you're a man, then you're already, you're sort of drawn the short straw because you're naturally putting much more fat into visceral fat than women do, who tend to put it into their hips and their bums.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  That changes for women as they go through perimenopause and they, because of those changes in hormone, it's just a fact that even if they're keeping their weight the same, it's going to redistribute towards their belly and towards the visceral fat. And so although you're eating in just the same way and you're doing the same things, like your body is changing and, you know, that's just a reality of this hormonal change. But it matters because putting on that visceral fat is bad for your, your health. The other thing that I'm really struck by is this idea that if I eat McDonald's, my fat is basically McDonald's. If I'm eating avocado, then all the fat in my body is basically avocado fat.

• 56:13Speaker 00

  And that's really crazy because you literally are what you eat is what you're saying, Jimmy. The bad news is that's not going to change instantly, but the good news is you can change it. You're not stuck with it for the rest of your life. So even if you just keep your fat levels constant, after two to three years of eating a healthier diet, you could have turned over and replaced all of that unhealthy fat with a healthy fat. And I guess this also talks to the fact that you can get a lot of benefits from a healthy diet fast. But if you can sustain that for two or three years, then you start to get this amazing benefit. And if we talk about certain fats, like the fats in red meat as being unhealthy, that's also true inside my body.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  So if my visceral fat is all saturated fat, which is as a result of what I'm eating, then actually that's bad for my health. If I start eating olive oil and avocados and things like that, I could replace that visceral fat now with avocado and olive oil fat. That's actually going to be healthier for me.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do want to emphasize the point that adipose tissue, this organ is made of lots of components and liver fat and pancreas fat and muscle fat are as important as visceral fat when it comes to, to health. But they all get affected the same way when you do intervention.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, so let's talk about the intervention. So the intervention you don't want to do is yo-yo dieting. Because although you'll lose some weight, then when you bounce back, actually what happens is you've lost muscle and you put on more fat. And so if you keep doing yo-yo dieting, you actually end up with much worse body composition. And similarly, as you think about these GLP-1s, you will lose visceral fat as you lose weight. But if you bounce back, you're going to be in a worse place. And even as you've come down, like you've probably lost muscle, so you've really got to be aware of that. On the positive side, like the thing that can really make a difference here, um, beyond the food that you eat is physical activity. And all exercise is good.

• 58:17Speaker 00

  You talked about the fact like, you know, if you don't go for a walk, go for a walk. If you go for a walk now, so to the point that you're a bit breathless as you do it, this is going to be great for your visceral fat. Because actually, all exercise is going to burn some fat and your body is going to sort of pull out the visceral fat first because it's easy to get to. That's exciting. But if there's one key message from all of this, it's do resistance training. That is the thing that is going to target that sort of visceral fat the best. And with this benefit that it builds these muscles, that then has all of this sort of like counter action against the, the fat. And in your studies, you said in 12 weeks' time, using this combination of improved diet and resistance training,

• 59:01Speaker 00

  you can have a significant reduction in this visceral fat and therefore an improvement in real measures of health.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and just think fat is your friend.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  I'll leave you with one final thought. What if there was one simple habit that when repeated could change how you feel for the better? I'd like to tell you about something that I do daily for my own health. It's called Daily 30, the gut supplement developed by our scientists here at Zoe. Daily 30 is made of over 30 hand-picked plants, including seaweed, fungi and different types of fibre. It's a source of plant protein, omega-3 and vital minerals. You simply add a scoop to any meal once a day to support your health and increase the plant diversity in your diet. And unlike synthetic supplements, Daily 30 actually tastes great. It's designed to be enjoyed because when a habit brings you joy, you're far more likely to stick with it.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  So next time you feel like your plate is missing extra plants, do yourself a favor, try Daily 30. It's a delicious and healthy habit that you'll feel good about and one that your gut will definitely thank you for. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fibre, we're required to say that it contains four grams of tuttle fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. So order yours today at zoe.com/daily30. See you next time.