Be slim with coffee, chocolate or red wine? Easy weight loss with the sirtfood diet?

Two very big in the celebrity world are "suspected" with the sirtfood diet neat to lose body weight. We are talking about Pippa Middleton and the singer Adele. The fitness coaches of the two stars swear by Sirtford and so the guess of the English gossip press was of course close.

If you take a closer look at the new diet, you will notice that it has potential - but above all because it is not really that new.

The sirtfood diet drives the sirtuins. (Image: Viacheslav Iakobchuk / fotolia.com)

The headlines read, as one is used to in a new diet, exaggerated and overly optimistic: "Young and slim with pleasure", "How to eat younger", "The tastiest diet in the world!" So Sirtfood books were announced , The diet should not only slim without giving up, but also rejuvenate and activate so-called "slimming genes". To be too good to be true? Not really. Although chocolate and red wine are among the permitted foods.

The new diet was developed by US nutritionists Aidan Goggins and Glen Matten. The term "sirtfood" they derived from the sirtuins, which belong for some years to the most popular research objects of medicine. Because the enzymes control many metabolic and aging processes. There are seven of them, which differ in their effects and influence each other, so that one usually drives several of them at the same time, if one turns somewhere "on a Sirtuin screw".

Sirt1 reduces the buildup of white adipose tissue, but it itself is influenced by another sirtuin, Sirt7. At the Bad Nauheim Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research, it has recently been discovered that mice can slim down to an anorexia-like condition by shutting off Sirt7 and thereby boosting Sirt1 activity.

Meanwhile, sirtuins 3 and 6 are known to be involved in the metabolism in the brain. In response and memory tests, subjects with low Sirt3 scores performed significantly worse.

They also had more tau proteins in the brain, which are considered to be a contributor to Alzheimer's. In the meantime, sirtuins 1 and 2 may be considered as the key players in the metabolism of sugars because they improve the insulin sensitivity of fat, muscle and liver cells.

The drug metformin is used against diabetes and works only because it increases the Sirt1 level. Pharmaceutical researchers are now working on a way to initiate this increase directly, without the detour via metformin.

Goggins and Matten now claim that one can influence the sirtuin level without drugs - namely by a special diet: the Sirtfood diet. It is mainly based on foods with a high content of polyphenols, ie tannins.

Red wine and chocolate are allowed at Sirtfood. (Image: Ilshat / fotolia.com)

Sirtfood also includes the classic weight loss principle "less is more". "Polyphenol-containing foods and reducing calorie intake have similar effects on sirtuins, especially sirt1," Goggins and Matten emphasize. That's why the sirtfood diet then rises, not surprisingly, with the waiver.

The first phase lasts 3 days and consists of a reduction to 1000 kilocalories per day, which are distributed to two sirtfood-rich vegetable juices and a sirtfood-rich meal. For the next four days, 1500 kilocalories are scheduled, divided into two juices and two meals. The conclusion is a stabilization period of two weeks, in which you can consume three sirt meals and a sirt drink.

Afterwards, the calories are no longer reduced. "It's more about getting used to having more sirt food on the menu," Goggins and Mattens point out. Ultimately, therefore, a long-term change of diet is targeted - and this is the sirt authors with the views of large professional societies, such as the German Nutrition Society, then again completely agree,

And not only there is unity. Thus, the list of polyphenol-containing sirtfood inevitably includes plant foods such as walnut, olive oil, garlic, arugula, parsley, capers and also a little red wine, the typical ingredients of the Mediterranean diet, which is considered by nutritional physicians to be particularly healthy. Other components of the sirt diet are known from Asian cuisine such as turmeric, tofu, red onions and green tea.

The latter showed a particularly large influence on the sirtuins in the laboratory, as well as coffee and chocolate, which, so to speak, still give the sirtfood a tasty crown. Of course, such recommendations make a diet just as much more appealing as dying and counting calories.

Without waiver it is not synonymous with Sirtfood. (Image: Dimid / fotolia.com)

Clinical evidence for the sirt diet, however, there is no. Neither for their effect on body weight, nor for the effects on brain, sugar metabolism and life expectancy. But a research team of the Christian-Albrecht-University in Kiel concludes in a study that the combination of Mediterranean and Asian food is indeed "a promising strategy" to protect against chronic diseases and to a contribute to healthy aging ".

The North German nutritionists also see the siruinanregenden effect, but he was also just one of many effects that emanated from this predominantly vegetarian food combination. Therefore you prefer to call the approach "Mediterr¬Asian diet".

Whether this name will prevail in the well-known for their dazzling titles dieting scene, however, is questionable. (Fs)