Dr. Sylvia Tara, author of The Secret Life Of Fat, interviewed by Dave Asprey/Bulletproof Diet - on viruses, genetics, diets, that cause obesity

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#1

Very intriguing!

Skip to minute 2 of the video to get to the actual intro of Dr. Tara.

“There are more fat cells in the human body than there are people on the earth.”

Biochemist Sylvia Tara, PhD is of East Indian origin. She’s the author of The Secret Life Of Fat, she’s a mother, a fat-hacker, and a scientist. She sees body fat as an organ system - because fat cells produce and release hormones. In 2017 she was interviewed for a podcast by formerly obese Dave Asprey, founder of Bulletproof Diet, and author of several books on biohacking for health - also available on video.

“Fat is doing a lot more in your body than you think it is.”

“The bigger your fat cells are, the more estrogen you make.”

“Women can turn their menstrual cycles on and off with just 3 pounds of fat.”

“You have to think about fat as you’d think about other organs.”

“So many trainers have never had a weight problem, and so many of them are male. They couldn’t understand why I wasn’t losing weight. I have a lot of things working against me: lower midlife hormones, thrifty genotypes/genetics that don’t burn as much energy (due to epigenetics having to do with famine), female biology, viruses that can create more fat cells, molds that cause fatness, and microbiome play a role too.”

They also talk about the differences of brown fat, beige fat, and white fat.

“There’s 10x more stem cells in fat than bone marrow.”

Lots of fascinating talk about leptin and toxins.

“Body composition is so much more than calories… fat is much more sophisticated than people think. Body fat interacts with our bodies in so many different ways, it sustains blood supply.”

“People who have dichotomous thinking fail at dietary changes the most. Forgiveness of yourself helps people stay with their plan longterm, give yourself a break.”

#2

Here’s more about the SMAM-1 virus and the work of Nikhil Dhurandhar MS which started in Mumbai India - an excerpt from Dr. Tara’s book. The root cause of obesity is sometimes viruses that compound dietary risk factors.

“Dhurandhar says, “At that time I had my obesity clinic, and I was doing blood tests for patients for their treatment. I thought I might just as well take a little bit of blood and test for antibodies to SMAM-1. Antibodies would indicate whether the patient was infected in the past with SMAM-1. The conventional wisdom is that an adenovirus for chickens does not infect humans, but I decided to check anyway. It turned out that 20 percent of the people we tested were positive for antibodies for SMAM-1. And those 20 percent were heavier, had greater body mass index and lower cholesterol and lower triglycerides compared to the antibody-negative individuals, just as the chickens had.” Dhurandhar observed that people who had been infected with SMAM-1 were on average 33 pounds heavier than those who weren’t infected.”

"After taking on a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, Madison under Dr. Richard Atkinson, Dhurandhar was excited to finally be at liberty to pursue what he loved. He had an intense curiosity about viruses and was eager to get started finding answers. However, when he tried to get samples of the SMAM-1 virus that he had worked with in India, the U.S. Department of Agriculture refused to grant him an import license. He was deeply disappointed unable to get SMAM-1.

Dhurandhar approached a company that sells viruses for research. Their catalog listed some fifty human adenoviruses. He says, “I was going to order the human adenovirus, but there was no the adenovirus—there were 50 different human adenoviruses! … We liked number 36 because it was antigenically unique—meaning it did not cross react with other viruses in the group, and antibodies to other viruses would not neutralize it. That was a serendipitous choice. It turned out that Ad-36 had similar qualities to SMAM-1 in chickens."

"How would a virus like Ad-36 cause fat? Atkinson explains, “There are three ways that we think Ad-36 makes people fatter: (1) It increases the uptake of glucose from the blood and converts it to fat; (2) it increases the creation of fat molecules through fatty acid synthase, an enzyme that creates fat; and (3) it enables the creation of more fat cells to hold all the fat by committing stem cells, which can turn into either bone or fat, into fat. So the fat cells that exist are getting bigger, and the body is creating more of them.”