Losing 5% is enough to improve your health

Lose five pounds when you weigh over a pound? That’s like taking a thousand off the price of a new Audi, you might say. But make no mistake, appearances are deceiving. If you manage to reduce your weight by 5%, you’ll probably be far from happy with your appearance, but your health will benefit considerably.

Obesity may bother most people for cosmetic reasons, but its health consequences are very serious. Fat tissue is heavily infiltrated by immune cells, resulting in mild chronic inflammation throughout the body.

In addition, obese people have different epigenetic patterns than lean people. In simple terms, this means that genes in their DNA that are supposed to protect them from a range of diseases, for example, are switched off, while those that make them more likely to develop them are switched on. It is for these reasons that being overweight and obese significantly increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and certain cancers. Therefore, trying to lose weight is definitely worthwhile, because this is literally about life.

Small target, big effect

However, it is not necessary to lose dozens of kilograms to achieve a beneficial health effect. In fact, recently published research by a scientific team led by Dr Samuel Klein, director of the University of Washington’s Center for Human Nutrition, has shown that significant health benefits can be achieved by losing as little as 5% of body weight. Volunteers who reached this mark not only had a significant reduction in total body fat, but more importantly in the proportion of fat in the liver, a marked improvement in the activity of the beta cells of the pancreas that produce insulin, and an increase in the sensitivity of muscle and liver tissue to insulin, which not only led to a stabilisation of blood glucose levels, but also facilitated further weight loss. Indicators related to cardiovascular disease risk were also significantly reduced.

If weight loss continued, some health indicators continued to improve, such as beta-cell function or muscle sensitivity to insulin, but others remained unchanged. In contrast, virtually the only thing that did not respond to moderate weight loss was the level of inflammation in the body – to achieve improvement in this area, you need to lose much more than the 5%.

Influence genes through nutrition

The good news is that you can also support epigenetic changes leading to weight loss with nutrition and supplements. For example, reducing the proportion of carbohydrates in the diet, and dietary supplements such as EGCG, curcumin or quercetin can have a positive effect.