Peter Attia· MD
the visceral is basically around the organs and the way I explain it like that is because with the suburban fat you're basically you've got fat cells and you've got fat structures that are more lobulated and organized kind of like a tract home or strip mall type out in the suburbs and they don't have as much access to the blood supply when you get deeper into the layers of the deep subcutaneous fat and the visceral fat what happens is it's more loosely organized it's not as lobulated but they've got direct access to the liver in the bloodstream and that's really important when we think about subcutaneous fat often people think oh my god I hate my subcutaneous fat but really there's a subcutaneous fat it's a safety belt for us when you have larger subcutaneous fat stores it insulates you and protects you from having fat spill into those visceral fat stores so as much as my female patients complain about subcutaneous fat I'm like this is actually a safety belt for me because we don't want this fat to get into the inner city as we get to the visceral fat the other thing you want to be aware of is the concept of trans membrane flux and what I mean by that is two fatty acids that flow inside and outside of fat cells in subcutaneous fat it's relatively inert so you might get some fatty acid flux you don't get many inflammatory chemicals that come out of that fat but as you go into the inner city fat the visceral fat there's all types of cross traffic happening you've got inflammatory mediators your usual Oedipa kinds inflammatory chemicals you've got a lot of free fatty acids going back and forth