Drinking Orange Juice Daily can Fight Obesity, Heart Disease, Diabetes

Highlights:

Drinking orange juice can keep obesity, heart disease, and diabetes at bay
Nobiletin, a molecule found in sweet oranges and tangerines can reduce body fat and blood sugar levels naturally
So, gulp down two and a half glasses of orange juice every day to lose weight in a healthy way

Daily dose of tangy orange juice can protect you from obesity, heart disease, and diabetes, reports a new study.//

The equivalent of just two and a half glasses of orange juice a day could reverse obesity and reduce the risk of heart disease and diabetes. Researchers at Western University are studying a molecule found in sweet oranges and tangerines called nobiletin, which they have shown to drastically reduce obesity and reverse its negative side-effects.

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‘Gulping down just two and a half glasses of orange juice a day can keep obesity, heart disease and diabetes at bay.’
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But, why it works remains a mystery.

New research published in the Journal of Lipid Research demonstrates that mice fed a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet that were also given nobiletin were noticeably leaner and had reduced levels of insulin resistance and blood fats compared to mice that were fed a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet alone.

"We went on to show that we can also intervene with nobiletin," said Murray Huff, PhD, a Professor at Western's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry who has been studying nobiletin's effects for over a decade. "We've shown that in mice that already have all the negative symptoms of obesity, we can use nobelitin to reverse those symptoms, and even start to regress plaque build-up in the arteries, known as atherosclerosis."

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But, Huff says he and his team at Robarts Research Institute at Western still haven't been able to pinpoint exactly how nobiletin works. The researchers hypothesized that the molecule was likely acting on the pathway that regulates how fat is handled in the body. Called AMP Kinase, this regulator turns on the machinery in the body that burns fats to create energy, and it also blocks the manufacture of fats.

However, when the researchers studied nobiletin's effects on mice that had been genetically modified to remove AMP Kinase, the effects were the same.

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"This result told us that nobiletin is not acting on AMP Kinase, and is bypassing this major regulator of how fat is used in the body," said Huff. "What it still leaves us with is the question - how is nobiletin doing this?"

Huff says while the mystery remains, this result is still clinically important because it shows that nobiletin won't interfere with other drugs that act on the AMP Kinase system. He says current therapeutics for diabetes like metformin for example, work through this pathway.

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The next step is to move these studies into humans to determine if nobiletin has the same positive metabolic effects in human trials.

"Obesity and its resulting metabolic syndromes are a huge burden to our health care system, and we have very few interventions that have been shown to work effectively," said Huff. "We need to continue this emphasis on the discovery of new therapeutics."

Reference:

The citrus flavonoid nobiletin confers protection from metabolic dysregulation in high-fat-fed mice independent of AMPK - (https://www.jlr.org/content/61/3/387)

Source-Eurekalert