Turn Food to Muscle, Not Fat

[01dragonslayer]

Scientists have discovered a compound that precisely controls nutrients so what you eat literally turns to muscle instead of fat.​

"Everything I eat seems to turn to muscle.

"When I started taking the dark-indigo capsules I weighed 221. Eight days later I had dumped fat and excess water and dropped down to 211. At first I thought I was taking a fat-burner. But after six days of adding carbs (like you suggested) I’m up to a lean 224, and I’m just as lean (if not leaner) as I was at 211!

“I hate to be ‘that guy’ who keeps on raving about something, but I honestly would take up a second mortgage to make sure that I never run out of this stuff. It keeps getting better and better. The only downside is that I’m changing too fast and people are starting to ‘talk.’” – Christian Thibaudeau

Medical research has given us something special, something that has the potential to make building muscle and losing fat a whole lot easier. Scientists have discovered a naturally occurring compound that has the ability to precisely control nutrients so that what you eat literally turns to muscle instead of fat.

No more bulking up and then dieting down, only to find that you lost as much muscle as fat. No more ketogenic starvation diets. No more haunting thoughts about the carbohydrate-dense foods you eat in moments of “weakness” destroying your hard work in the gym. And no more depriving yourself of the optimal nutrition for building muscle because “your body can’t handle the calories and carbs” – because now it can.

All of this might seem hard to believe, but this compound really can override your body’s often dysfunctional nutrient uptake signals and drive anabolic nutrition right into muscle cells, while at the same time starving fat cells.

The compound is called cyanidin 3-glucoside, or simply C3G. C3G is an anthocyanidin that’s found mostly in certain berries. It’s technically classified as a “pigment” – it’s what gives blueberries their deep indigo-blue color.

Research has proven that C3G has a powerful effect on insulin signaling and glucose management. Furthermore, research has also shown that C3G is highly beneficial in regulating a variety of important cellular functions, including cell growth. C3G has even been shown to enhance night vision.

These are all incredible findings, but it’s the research on glucose management that’s grabbed the attention of the muscle-building world. To be able to precisely control nutrient uptake – shutting it down in fat and ramping it up in muscle – has been the ultimate desire of every advanced bodybuilder for the last 30 years.

C3G’s effects on insulin signaling, selective insulin sensitivity, glucose and nutrient repartitioning, as well as its direct effect on fat and muscle cells, is extremely elaborate and precise. It literally makes your body function perfectly for building muscle mass without the fear of gaining fat, even while on a bulking diet.

C3G makes the body-building process a whole new ballgame, and here’s how it performs its body-composition magic.

Here’s an interesting fact that you might not know. The fat cell (not the muscle cell) is a major regulator of how easily you gain muscle. It’s the fat cell that sends all of the molecular signals for glucose and nutrient uptake in both fat and lean tissue. This is especially important because it’s the nutrient uptake that has the most impact (not androgens) on gaining muscle.

As most advanced bodybuilders know, the most anabolic hormone in the body is insulin, not testosterone. Unfortunately, insulin is anabolic in both muscle and fat. But by decreasing the effects of insulin on fat and increasing the effects of insulin on muscle, you can achieve what no one thought was possible and turn the common man into a bodybuilding genetic freak.

As always, there are genetic limitations to how much muscle an individual can gain – C3G can’t turn short muscle bellies into long muscle bellies. But I think we all understand that. The real issue at hand isn’t the genetic limits on overall muscle size. The sad fact is, most people will never attain but a fraction of the gains they could – both in terms of muscle gains and overall leanness – due to their dysfunctional nutrient uptake.

Dysfunctional nutrient uptake results in what amounts to a bodybuilding identity crisis, where you go back and forth between trying to get big and trying to get shredded – but never truly achieving either goal.

You get bigger, alright, but it’s mostly fat. You tend to rationalize it until the day you see some guy in the gym with razor-sharp etched muscle who has yourlook – at least, the one you’ve decided you want now. You’re sick about what you’ve done to yourself, and with renewed vigor you’re off to shredded-land. Except, at the end of that jaunt, you haven’t etched anything and you’re now “skinny,” which totally ticks you off and sends you back the other direction.

This is obviously an irrational approach to achieving a lean and muscular body. But what’s not so obvious is the cause of this dysfunction. It’s due to a condition that’s tantamount to “inflammatory fat disease.”

Most diseases of modern living have been linked to inflammation. So it’s no wonder that researchers have found that inflammatory signaling has also caused fat cells to become dysfunctional, resulting in high circulating glucose levels, out of control appetite, fat cells that loveto get “fatter,” and lazy muscle cells that prefer to leave most of the fuel for the fat cells to gobble up and store.

This is where C3G comes in. The consensus among researchers is that C3G acts primarily (through the Glut4-RBP4 system) to optimize molecular crosstalk between fat cells, which directly decreases adipocyte inflammatory signals. The overall effect causes the body to repartition nutrients so that what you eat literally turns to muscle instead of fat.

In other words, your body resists storing fat, releases and oxidizes fat-cell content (fatty acids), and preferentially pulls glucose and nutrients into muscle cells.

Fat Cells: C3G actually up-regulates gene expression for fat oxidation (fat burning) and down-regulates gene expression for fat storage. The oxidation of fatty acids increases further directly through the release of adiponectin. The overall effect is that fat cells begin to shrink in size. The reduced inflammation also decreases the size of fat cells and disgorges the excess water associated with the inflammatory process (less bloated and squishy feeling to the fat under the skin).

Muscle Cells: Insulin sensitivity of muscle cells increases, thereby enhancing insulin signaling and glucose uptake, along with enhancing glycogen synthesis, which drives glucose and nutrients preferentially into muscle.

Liver Cells: Liver cells decrease gluconeogenesis via downregulation of glucose-6-phosphatase, preventing the liver from increasing circulating glucose levels.

GI Tract: Taken prior to meals, C3G decreases amylase and glucosidase, effectively decreasing the speed and extent of carbohydrate digestion.

This is “educated speculation” on our part, but if you’re one of the many who can’t handle carbs, your carb intolerance might not be a “life sentence.” In fact, you could find that after being on C3G for a while (maybe 12 weeks or so), you might not need to continue taking it. In other words, we’re thinking that fixing the fat cell really does *fix the fat cell,*and hopefully you’ll eventually be handling carbs like a “normal” person even without taking C3G.

On the other hand, if, after going off C3G, you were to throw caution to the wind and begin eating like a carb junkie, you’d eventually go right back to your carb-intolerant old self with the added bonusof carrying around extra kilos of jiggly body fat. But if you followed reasonable dietary guidelines, it’s perfectly plausible that you’d continue handling carbohydrates well.

Of course, you’d probably want to still use C3G from time to time as a preventative measure tune-up. You’d for sure want to use C3G during mass-gaining programs and, due to the highly anabolic nutrient-uptake effect C3G provides in muscle, advanced lifters would especially want to use C3G every time they trained.

It’s simple. Find raspberries or blueberries that actually contain high levels of C3G and then eat 12 pounds of them per day.

Too bad that’s not really feasible. Besides, blueberries (and the other berries and their extracts) that contain C3G also contain quercetin and other compounds (anthocyanins and anthocyanidins) that can either inhibit or diminish the effects of C3G.

So, even if you had a bottomless pit of a stomach, it’s literally impossible to eat enough blueberries or raspberries or berry extract to achieve any repartitioning effects from C3G.

And lastly, to make C3G even workable as a super-repartitioning compound, it needs to be formulated with enhanced bioavailability. So in summary, to be highly effective, you need a pure C3G compound that’s bioengineered with enhanced bioavailability.

The only problem is, at the time we started this project, no one had produced C3G in a purified state and in quantities suitable for drug or supplement applications. The only pure C3G being sold was intended for research and it cost $1,200 for 100 mg. That means it would’ve cost more than $60,000 just to manufacture a single bottle of C3G!

So if we wanted pure C3G, we had no other choice but to make it ourselves.

This may come as a surprise, but we started this project a little more than six years ago. In January, 2005, Biotest began working with a drug-development group to produce a pure C3G compound. This past January (2011) – exactly six years later – Biotest finally received its first bulk shipment of C3G. It’s a good thing we stuck with the project, too, because other than the material we produced, there’s currently no production quantities of C3G available anywhere in the world.

Still, there is a small handful of supplements on the market formulated with crude extracts that claim to contain C3G. But just as the case with fresh berries and berry extracts, none of these products contain the purified form of C3G or anywhere close to the amount of C3G required to be effective for nutrient repartitioning. Furthermore, none are designed to enhance the absorption of C3G.

Next, we conducted a dosing time-course study in humans to see if we could achieve the blood levels of C3G we were hoping for. We also wanted to map the pharmacokinetics of the compound to determine optimal dose amounts and timing. Here are the findings thus far:

1. substantially enhances the bioavailability of C3G and produces much higher levels in circulating blood than any of the previous research indicated was possible.
2. easily achieves the blood levels of C3G that we believe are required for maximum results.
3. dosing is optimal at three times per day, taken on an empty stomach, 30 - 60 minutes prior to a main meal or prior to starting peri-workout nutrition.

The next step is releasing Indigo-3G to a limited number of consumers, which will begin sometime next week. It’s not because we need more people to “try” it to convince us it really works as well as it’s working on our test subjects. We’re far beyond that phase. Our test protocol was designed to see if it were possible to make Indigo-3G fail. It was pretty simple, really. We gave Indigo-3G to a variety of individuals and told them to follow only three rules:

1. Do not reduce calories.
2. If anything, eat more calories per day.
3. Start adding in more carbs.

We’ve been monitoring subjects for as long as three months, and the results we’re seeing are so consistently profound among all subjects, we don’t need any more convincing. It’s simply time to begin letting the rest of the world in on our little secret.