Dear Friends,
In the last letter, I detailed our favorite blend of prebiotics, and recently a study involving one of those ingredients, a dietary fiber called Solnul, revealed it may offer exciting benefits for metabolic health and weight management.
If you’re not familiar with Solnul, it comes from potatoes. It’s in a class of fiber known as a resistant starch.
When you hear “starch”, your reaction may be “Wait, isn’t that bad? Why do I want that in a supplement?”
A resistant starch is resistant to digestion – it’s not broken down by digestive enzymes.
Regular starch is broken down during the digestive process into glucose or sugar molecules that get absorbed into the bloodstream and spike blood glucose levels.
That’s not what we want – especially if we’re trying to improve metabolic health, watch our weight or burn fat.
In contrast, resistant starch can actually help support good blood sugar health, and the latest research with Solnul found it may help improve one of the earliest signs that your body is struggling with blood sugar metabolism.
Consumption of this Fiber Has Plummeted
One more tidbit on resistant starch, ingesting at least 15g a day is the amount that has been associated with good metabolic health – and our ancestors used to consume much more, with estimates up to 50g daily.
However, because of modern diets and the way foods are processed and cooked, the average American typically only gets about 4 grams of resistant starch fiber daily.
In fact, one of the major sources of resistant starch for Americans is eating French fries – which may be one of the few nutritional benefits of French fries.
Unfortunately, the answer to getting more resistant starch daily is not eating more French fries. Which is too bad - who doesn’t love French fries?
Taking a supplement with the Solnul fiber is a much better idea – for many reasons.
Better Metabolic Function in Just 4 Weeks
In the new study, which was published in the journal Metabolites, the researchers found that taking 3.5g of the Solnul resistant starch fiber for 28 days helped promote better metabolic function in healthy adults.
In this case, by metabolic function, we’re referring to how efficiently the body converts energy in food to energy that’s available to power the cells in our body.
As you may know, an important part of metabolic function is how efficiently insulin can remove glucose from blood so it can be used for energy, or if not needed right away, stored in fat for later use.
Good metabolic function is key for weight management and important to maintain good heart and cardiovascular health over time.
An important part of this study is that it involved healthy adults with no signs of metabolic dysfunction.
Earliest Indicator of Metabolic Dysfunction
You may be wondering, how can they show an improvement in metabolic and insulin function in those who already have normal blood sugar measurements.
That was the interesting part of this study.
Normally, we assess metabolic health by looking at blood markers like blood glucose and A1C levels or cholesterol and triglyceride levels.
This study also measured what is believed to be the earliest indicator of metabolic health – which is the amount of free fatty acids circulating in the blood.
Even when all your other metabolic blood markers look good, if your free fatty levels are trending up, it can be a valuable indicator that trouble down the road may be brewing now – so you can take some steps to nip it in the bud.
Why Free Fatty Acids Matter
Let me take a minute to try to explain why free fatty acids matter for assessing metabolic function.
As we mentioned earlier, your body needs insulin to escort glucose from the blood to cells. Your body also uses insulin to help suppress the release of free fatty acids from fat cells to blood.
So, insulin helps move glucose from blood to cells, and insulin also helps keep free fatty acids in the cells, so they’re not released into blood.
What’s more, it’s been observed that it takes much more insulin to suppress the release of free fatty acids than it takes for fat cells to take up glucose from blood.
This is why free fatty acid levels can be an early marker of declining metabolic function.
If insulin isn’t working as efficiently as it had in the past, it’s likely to be seen in increased free fatty levels in the blood first – because it takes more insulin to suppress the release of those free fatty acids.
A key finding of this study is that, on average, those taking 3.5g of Solnul for 28 days reduced free fatty acid levels significantly more than the placebo group.
This suggests that even in this short time period, Solnul resistant starch intake had a positive effect on metabolic function in a group of healthy adults.
In next week’s letter, I’m going to share how the researchers believe Solnul helps support metabolic function – and review the other benefits of Solnul fiber (and more research is underway).
In the meantime, if you want to learn a little more about Solnul, you can check out our TrueDYB supplement, which includes Solnul.
Yours for Good Health,
Carl Pradelli
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