HCA - Hydroxy citrate acid or Hydroxycitricacid. Anyone tried this, and what results did you get?
Never tried it by itself but it is one of the main ingredients in most fat burners, hydroxycut etc , hence the name.
Hydroxycitrate (HCA) is primarily derived from the plant, Malabar tamarind. It’s a plant that grows domestically in southern India. It’s used in curry. Hence, many may have suspected that this may, in part, be the reason why East Indians are generally leaner than many other nations (?). Malabar contains about 30% of its dry weight as hydroxycitrate, and this substance became quite popular about 10 years ago because of some studies on animals that showed it had tremendous human application after these animals lost tons of body fat on the stuff.
It appears that HCA both inhibits fat production and suppresses appetite. Keep in mind the term, “citrate”. Does that ring a bell? Citrate is a pivotal component of the Citric Acid Cycle (Kreb’s Cycle).
As I see it: the results obtained in these animal studies likely relates to the ‘positional’ activity of citrate. Citrate, while in the mitochondria, serves to create energy (ATP, NADH, FADH) substrates for the oxidative chain. When citrate production (usually via the glycolytic pathway) is overly abundant (like, when we eat too many carbs), citrate can be shuttled outside of the mitochondria into cellular cytoplasm. Once in the cytoplasm, it quickly breaks down to provide acetyl CoA for fat synthesis (acetyl CoA is the basic building block for fats and cholesterol). That is why many of us think that eating too many carbs in the absence of adequate physical activity makes people fat.
Hydroxycitrate may help to flood the cytoplasm with a citrate ‘lookalike’, displacing any potential flux of citrate from the mitochondria. Thus, staving off the fat-building process to some degree. While HCA looks a lot like citrate, it likely does not possess citrate’s chemical activity - so it sits around and does not contribute building blocks for fat synthesis. This is how I propose that HCA might work.
In order to make this work, though, one must eat a low-fat diet. With a low-fat, hi-carb diet in mind, it might also be suggested that HCA be combined with lipoic acid (thioctic acid) and chromium/vanadium supplements.
Something to keep in mind…
Thankyou
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