Seaweed

So I was just looking up the components of an herbal supplement to see the research to back it up, and came across this little morsel in a review article looking at the benefits of seaweed.

"The fucoxanthin help reduce bodyweight by (i) upregulating mitochondrial uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1) gene expression in white adipose tissue (WAT) (Maeda, Hosokawa, Sashima, Funayama, & Miyashita, 2005), (i...i) leading to increase resting energy expenditure, through uncoupling step during cellular metabolism (Miyashita, 2006), (iii) oxidation of fatty acids, (iv) heat production in WAT20. (Kazuo, 2009 and Maeda et al., 2005); (v) reduced blood glucose and plasma insulin (Maeda, Tsukui, Sashima, Hosokawa, & Miyashita, 2008), and (vi) improved insulin resistance (Kazuo, 2009)."

So in case anyone out there eating lots of seaweed (sushi?) needed another reason to do it... it can benefit your waistline too.

Mohamed S, Hashim ST, Rahman HA. Seaweeds: A sustainable functional food for complementary and alternative therapy. Trends Food Sci Tech. 2012;23(2):83-96.