Sterculia Oil: Metabolic Results Number One

Inroduction

So I have a fancy metabolic tester to track my metabolic rate. It’s honestly pretty amazing if you have $7500 burning a hole on your pocket. Sometimes they have deals and I’m an affiliate so if you give them my code “BMarsh”, you’ll get $600 off.

If you can’t afford a metabolic tester, here’s a great idea from the r/SaturatedFat reddit board where ideas around The Croissant Diet are discussed. See how long you can hold your breath. Figure out what your baseline is, repeat it a few times, do your dietary change or whatever, then see how your time changes.

Looks like I’m mainly burning fat despite decent amount of carbs consumed from SaturatedFat

My Protocol

I’ve worked out a testing protocol that works for me. When I wake up I’m frenetic. I pace and think. That’s my happy place. I usually drink a pot of coffee while I do this. Yes, I said a pot. A french press really, but a good sized one. At that point I’ve burned off my morning pacing energy and I sit down with the metabolic tester right around 10am. The first five minutes of the test while I sit on the couch don’t count. That’s my settling in time and things are changing on the meter. Five minutes in the numbers tend to plateau. I take a five minute reading, then I get up and pace, which is my natural state as I’ve mentioned. My pacing happens at a pretty steady 2.7 MPH. That’s my protocol, it works for my. It’s not really a true “Resting Metabolic Rate” because I already had a pot of coffee and spent three hours pacing, but it’s internally consistent, which is the important thing for this.

I did the Feasting Mimicking Diet in the summer of 2020 and received the device in the middle of that trial. After the FeMD, I went back to “normo” eating because I wanted to get a true baseline for myself. I was very busy at the time, so this was easy. “Normo” eating is typically two meals a day, something like eggs and toast with butter late morning followed by steak and potato in the evening. I wasn’t doing any stearic acid supplementing (or any other supplementing) because I wanted to get my baseline.

Metabolic testers give you a bunch of data but the most important one by far is how much Oxygen you are consuming, defined as volume of Oxygen per minute measured in CCs. By mid-October, my Oxygen consumption (VO2) was typically in the high 200s. This is honestly not great for someone my size, even though I’m quite muscular. 280 CC’s VO2 is my torpor number. My pacing number was around 760. Metabolic testers also give you CO2 released, which in theory can tell you if you’re burning fat or carbs, but my VCO2 numbers are wonky. It’s not the device, it’s a me problem. I’ll have more to say about this later.

Over the next 8 weeks I consumed one teaspoon per day of sterculia oil. This is probably too much, it caused me some inflammation, but it DID have a notable increase in my metabolic rate, showing a steady increase the first week before plateauing in the mid 300’s with the pacing number averaging around 850. Not bad!

Eating Fat Bomb Fries, Getting Hyper

Mice who lack SCD1 have very high levels of VO2, fail to store fat and are called “hypermetabolic”. On January 2nd I took my first crack at hypermetabolism. I had been taking hi-dose sterculia oil for two months before stopping on December 15th to complete my safety/half-life trial. My blood test from January 5th showed that at that point the stearic acid in my red blood cell phospholipids was all the way up to 25% after being under 11% in October before I started the oil. I hoped this was reflected in my fat tissue.

Now it was time to combine the effects of the sterculia oil, with my most devious metabolism increasing diet: the Feasting Mimicking Diet. I already knew that my metabolic rate was higher during the feasting mimicking diet than it was after my “normo” diet. In August during FeMD my typical numbers were around 360 Resting and 900 pacing, not dissimilar to what they were with just hi-dose sterculia oil. So what if I combined them?

The reasoning is pretty straight-forward if you’ve followed this blog. The large amount of dietary stearic acid causes mitochondrial fusion and increases the rate of fat burning. My stored fat is hopefully now more saturated so that the blend of fat entering the mitochondria is highly saturated. This should drive ROS, production, mitochondrial uncoupling and therefore metabolic rate. I did my first feast of Fat Bomb Fries and Pancake Chicken the evening of January second then didn’t consume solid food again until my second feast the evening of January 4th. Look at what happened.

	VO2 Resting	Heart Rate Resting	VO2 Walking	Heart Rate Walking
10/16/2020	292	63	751	73
10/18/2020	272		777
Beginning of Sterculia Oil.
10/20/2020	327		754
10/22/2020	345	75	791	83
10/24/2020	359	76	832	82
10/28/2020	362	69	871	76
12/10/2020	329	78	821	87
End of Sterculia Oil.
1/2/2021	360	75	901	84
Beginning of Feast/Fast Stearic Acid Macro Dosing.
Red blood cell membrane stearic acid phospholipid level at 25%.
1/3/2021	378	71	916	84
1/4/2021	387	80	1029	86
1/5/20201	416	82	1021	91
1/7/2021	380	85	845	90
1/9/2021	389	83	907	90
1/20/2021	361	80	883	85
1/21/20201	363	75	852	81
1/22/2021	380	80	851	86
1/23/2021	354	70	802	77
1/26/2021	373	83	874	94
1/27/2021	342	82	925	93
1/28/2021	339	86	853	94

On the third, I got one of my highest readings to date, which was surpassed on the fourth. After the second feast meal, on the morning of the fifth, i recorded my highest ever Resting reading – 416! For the second straight day I recorded a pacing VO2 of over 1000 – a nice round number! The numbers declined over the rest of the month in parallel with my stearic acid numbers….

I consider this experiment to be a proof of concept. Something happened. I saw a response. That’s cool. Now we have to figure out how to harness the power for long term gain.