Fat is fat, you might think. Not so.

When you “pinch an inch” of the fat around your tummy you are measuring subcutaneous fat. Less visible in the abdominal cavity, deep inside and surrounding your organs, you’ll find a second kind—visceral fat. Scientists have recently discovered that visceral fat produces inflammatory molecules which contribute to hypertension, artherosclerosis and insulin resistance. Can the raw food diet help?

According to researchers at St Louis’s Washington University School of Medicine, the visceral fat cells inside the abdomen secrete molecules that increase inflammation. An “apple-shaped” body the product of visceral fat’s being stored in the abdomen, resulting from a defect in the body's response to insulin.

The fat itself isn’t the problem. By removing subcutaneous fat with liposuction, researchers discovered that this did not provide the same metabolic benefits as losing the same amount of fat via diet and exercise. Dr. Samuel Klein, senior investigator and Danforth Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Science, says, “Despite removing large amounts of subcutaneous fat from beneath the skin—about 20 percent of a person's total body fat mass—there were no beneficial medical effects.”

These results demonstrate that decreasing fat mass by surgery, which removes billions of fat cells, does not provide the metabolic benefits seen when fat mass is reduced by lowering calorie intake, which shrinks the size of fat cells and decreases the amount of fat inside the abdomen and other tissues.

The researchers began to look at the visceral fat that surrounds the organs in the gut, and found that it secreted high levels of an inflammatory molecule called interleuken-6 or IL-6 directly into the portal vein blood. Since this fat is very close to the intestines and organs and cannot be removed as easily as subcutaneous fat, they decided to analyze the blood running through the portal vein.

Dr Luigi Fontana is an assistant professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis and an investigator at the Istituto Superiore di Sanita, Rome, Italy. He explains: “The portal vein is filled with blood that drains visceral fat.” According to the research conducted, portal vein blood had levels of IL-6 that were 50 percent higher than blood from the periphery.

This increase was found to correlate with levels of another inflammatory substance called C-reactive protein or CRP. The medical community has long recognized that CRP levels play a significant role in inflammation and that chronic inflammation leads to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and hypertension, among other things. “These data support the notion that visceral fat produces inflammatory cytokines that contribute to insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease,” says Klein.

Dr. Fontana believes that the findings help to explain exactly how visceral fat relates to inflammation, insulin resistance and other metabolic disorders. He adds that the inflammation may be contributing to even more. “Many years ago, atherosclerosis was thought to be related to lipids and to the excessive deposit of cholesterol in the arteries,” Fontana says. “Nowadays, it's clear that atherosclerosis is an inflammatory disease. There also is evidence that inflammation plays a role in cancer, and there is even evidence that it plays a role in aging. Someday we may learn that visceral fat is involved in those things, too.”

Japanese researchers have found that caloric restriction in rats quickly and significantly lowers the presence of visceral fat and its attendant complications. The results of this study show that “visceral fat accumulation is accompanied by several metabolic disorders, such as hyperlipidemia, hypertension, and glucose intolerance, leading to advanced artherosclerosis.” After practicing caloric restriction for 14 days, visceral fat accumulation decreased by 21 percent whereas subcutaneous fat showed no significant change.

The good news for us is that these studies only reinforce the knowledge that practicing Quantum Eating can most assuredly reduce the accumulation of visceral fat and all its attendant detriments to health and ant-aging. Going ‘raw and low’ gives you a double-edged sword to fight not only external fat, but insidious visceral fat as well.

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