Relacore for fat gain from stress?

[alexsmom]

Has anybody hard of a product called "Relacore"? I saw an article on this the other day and supposedly it's supposed to help stress-related fat gain in the stomach area due to elevated cortisol levels. You can find info at www.relacore.com. Click on "relacore" tab. Sounded pretty interesting.

Thanks!

 

[MS]

I would be more than a LITTLE suspicious of any product that doesn't even tell you what the alledged active ingredient is. Aside from that, I think you're naive if you believe that all you have to do to lose fat is to reduce cortisol levels...........

 

[alexsmom]

Of course I'm not saying that I believe that's all you need to lose fat. I know there was a thread a few months ago about stress and high cortisol levels causing people to hold onto belly fat no matter how hard they worked out or dieted. So....when I saw the ad I was curious if anybody knew about it.

 

[FitFossil]

I've read various studies too about a relationship between cortisol and belly fat. As for Relacore, I don't know. It looks like a mixture of vitamins and some familiar and unfamiliar herbs, but they don't tell you what concentrations they're in. I'd give the packaging high marks for its pharmaceutical look though.

I did a Google search on "Carter-Reed" and couldn't find anything about them as a company other than in the Relacore ad or with other supplement companies selling it. There were many articles with "Carter, Reed" in the title - referring to the NFL players (and brothers) Dale Carter and Jake Reed, who moved from the Minnesota Vikings to the New Orleans Saints as a package deal. I don't really follow sports, but maybe that's why those names seemed familiar, as it was very well-publicized.

 

[MS]

The idea of stress as the cause of the majority of modern abdominal obesity is really pretty silly IMHO. Unless, of course, you're willing to include obesity and inactivity as prime stressors! (which they certainly are).

The link between observed cortisol levels and abdominal obesity shows that obese people actually have IMPAIRED cortisol production in the liver (where it is normally produced at the highest levels). In a lean person this might lead to hypocortisolism. Fortunately for obese people, adipose tissue is also a great source of cortisol production, and their body more than compensates for the reduction in liver production by ramping up adipose production.

To put it bluntly, obesity causes elevated cortisol production and not the other way around in the vast majority of overweight people. I think that if they were not so fat, they would be less 'stressed' on many levels!

This does not mean that drugs which can reduce cortisol (prolly by inhibiting the enzyme in adipose tissue that converts cortisone to cortisol) are not beneficial to someone trying to lose fat. But there is no evidence that relacore does this, and it is erroneous to believe that the cortisol made you fat in the first place. Too much food makes you fat. Less food makes you lose fat.

And as spatts said, genuine stress that causes illness should be stopped at the source. A bandaid will not help long term.......