Move over diet and exercise. Now you can eat clay!

Well, it’s still too early to interpret this sweeping statement as fact. But keep reading below because this new area of research has certainly piqued the interest of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

 Clay sucks the fat?

New research published in BMC Biomedical Engineering suggests that eating a side of montmorillonite clay might help to prevent obesity by flushing fat from your system. Scientists at the University of South Australia accidentally found that this kind of clay binds to fat and carries it out of the body better than a weight loss drug. They believe dirt might be the key to fighting the obesity epidemic.

How strange!

Most of the articles, which I have written about clay have to do with detoxification. Its benefits for cleaning out the system have been widely researched in clinical trials. My readers know that I eat clay every day for this reason and have been doing it for upwards of thirty years.

After all, the detoxification benefits of montmorillonite clay are largely why the mineral has been extolled since time immemorial. Other clays such as kaolinite have been lauded for their anti-diarrhea properties. Ipsen Pharmaceuticals out of France sells a clay called Smecta for this purpose. And there are a number of drugs and over-the-counter products made entirely from clay.

But the idea of clay and its ability to trap fat? This is new and novel area of discovery. The research on this topic is very preliminary and has yet to be fully explored.

How did the discovery happen?

Tahnee Dening, a Ph.D. candidate, was trying to find compounds that could improve the way the body absorbs antipsychotic pills. Specifically, she was investigating the ability of clay particles to improve the oral delivery and absorption of antipsychotic drugs in animals.

“I noticed that the clay particles weren’t behaving as I’d expected,” she said. “Instead of breaking down to release drugs, the clay materials were attracting fat droplets and literally soaking them up. Not only were the clay materials trapping the fats within their particle structure, but they were also preventing them from being absorbed by the body, ensuring that fat simply passed through the digestive system. It’s this unique behavior that immediately signaled we could be onto something significant—potentially a cure for obesity.”

They ran an experiment

Dening and her team began to conduct experiments in which four groups of lab rats were fed high-fat diets. The four groups of lab animals were fed the following:

Group 1 was fed dried particles of natural montmorillonite clay, (the same clay which is the focus of my book, Healing with Clay: Natural Healing from the Earth).

Group 2 ate a synthetic clay called laponite.

Group 3 were dosed with a well-recognized weight-loss drug called orlistat.

Group 4 was the control group, the one that received nothing other than the high fat foods.

Roll the results

So what happened next? Well, after a couple of weeks, the two groups of clay-eating rats and the orlistat-taking rats had all lost weight, with the animals that consumed the clay losing a bit more. The researchers were genuinely surprised.

Something important to note is that the rats from the clay groups exhibited no side effects. Why its significant to note is because orlistat works by blocking digestive enzymes, it can cause side effects such as stomach aches, bloating, flatulence and diarrhea.

This area of research could prove to be groundbreaking in terms of a new way to utilize clay. Hopefully, there will be human trials that will continue to investigate clay and its potential use as a treatment aid in weight loss.