The Delta Project - Wellness Forum

🍓Out-of-season fruit is slowing your fat-burning switch🍓

A small rat study in 2020 looked at something most nutrition advice completely ignores:

What happens when the body receives food from the wrong season?

The rats were living under a winter-like light cycle.

But they were given oranges grown in the opposite hemisphere—fruit carrying the chemical signals of a different season.

The result?

They gained more fat.

Researchers also found lower activity in two genes linked to fat-burning:

ℹ️PPARα
Helps switch the body into using fat as fuel.

ℹ️CPT1b
Helps move fat into the mitochondria—where fat is burned for energy.

When those signals dropped, less fat was being directed toward the cellular “furnaces.”

And more of it was stored 😳

It raises a far bigger question:

Have we removed so much seasonality from our food that our metabolism no longer knows what time of year it is?

We now eat summer fruit in winter.
Winter fruit in summer.
The same foods every day of the year.

And then we act surprised when the body becomes confused, tired, inflamed and resistant to letting go of weight.

— The Delta Project

*Reference: Gibert-Ramos A, Palacios-Jordan H, Salvadó MJ, Crescenti A. Consumption of out-of-season orange modulates fat accumulation, morphology and gene expression in the adipose tissue of Fischer 344 rats. European Journal of Nutrition. 2020.*

The biggest point of failure in mitochondria is usually the electron transport chain, where oxygen is converted into usable cellular energy (ATP).

For your social media audience, a highly shareable poster would be:

Most people think energy comes from food.

Food provides the fuel.

The electron transport chain decides whether that fuel becomes energy.

When the chain slows down, everything downstream slows down too. 🔋