Conjugated Linoleic Acid In The Body

Conjugated linoleic acid, is a form of linoleic acid, an omega-6 fatty acid important to human health (Wang and Jones, 2004). The CLA is formed by the bacteria in rumen of certain ruminants but not for humans. It is obtained by humans from dietary sources such as beef, lamb and dairy products including milk and cheese (Wang and Jones, 2004). CLA is an antioxidant, anti-carcinogenic, anti-diabetogenic, anti-atherosclerotic, anti-catabolite as well as an immune system enhancer (Belury, 2002). Health benefits have been attributed to the use of CLA and this includes body fat reduction, building and retention of lean body mass. It also reduces the risk of obesity
The history of CLA health benefits and function dates back to 1980, when Michael Pariza
To provide the best source of information, Pub Med, Google scholar and university of Toronto libraries were used as my search engines. To begin my research, I typed in certain key words such as conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) to get an idea about the broadness of discussions on the topic. Next, I narrowed down the topic by picking areas I wanted to focus on which is regulation of body fat and energy metabolism. Relevant primary articles and reviews were found, allowing an appropriate range of selection based on the date of publication which allows a ten to fifteen years maximum. Although some sources exceeded fifteen years, I read through them to make sure they were still scientifically applicable. After picking the articles, I determined their peer review status using Ulrich web directory. The review topic was written in a sequential manner, finding a new article every day of the
In an experiment carried out by West et al, a group of rats exposed to the same experimental conditions were fed a high fat and a low fat diet with and without CLA supplements for six weeks. The high fat control mice weighed 5.7g less than the control mice, on the other hand, the low fat control mice weighed 3.2g more than the Mice supplemented with CLA (West et al, 1998). This change in weight and overall body composition is brought about by apoptosis of the adipocyte tissues (Wang and Jones, 2004). Human pre-adipocytes taken from the human tissues were cultured and exposed to 100uM conjugated Linoleic acid for 24-94 h (Evans et al, 2000). This induced the release of the tumor necrosis factor as measured using DNA analysis (TNF- alpha), causing apoptotic tissue death in human cells. TNF-alpha functions in preventing the development of preadipocytes to mature adipocytes and causes the delipidation of newly formed adipocyte tissue in humans (Sorisky et al 2004). In the experiment carried out above, after the exposure, the cultured cells had less triglycerides content and inhibits lipoprotein lipase activity as compared to the control (Evans et al, 2000: Park et al, 1999). CLA reduces buildup of triglycerides in adipocytes tissue while the inhibition of fatty acids intake (energy intake) prevents the fatty acid incorporation to form triglycerides stored in the adipocyte (Beleury