Doctor's best fat burner

What happens if you add even more nutrients to the already super-nutritious Mediterranean diet? Scientists recently decided to find out...and the results were pretty magical. Here’s how their study went: Volunteers enjoyed healthy portions of Mediterranean staples like produce, whole grains, seafood and olive oil—“plus a daily smoothie very rich in antioxidants,” shares The Lose Your Belly Diet author Travis Stork, M.D., a fan of super-smoothies and the Mediterranean diet. As folks sipped their special drinks, they slimmed down at triple the speed of typical dieters. Better yet, readers testing the strategy report losing up to 22 pounds in just 14 days!

- Allison Nemetz

There’s a secret ingredient that makes these particular smoothies work so well. “They’re loaded with polyphenols,” reveals Dr. Stork. Turns out, the hardiest and longest-living Mediterranean dieters have off-the-charts intake of the potent antioxidant compounds. For example, natives of the Greek isle of Ikaria—one of the five healthiest places on Earth, per the famous “Blue Zones” study—eat local plants with 10 times more polyphenols than most produce. “Even their wine is higher in polyphenols,” adds the doc. It’s a big rea son Ikarians defy heart disease, seldom get diabetes and have almost no dementia. It also helps keep them effortlessly lean.

Tiny nutrients, huge benefits

According to Dr. Stork, every plant on Earth contains at least some polyphenols. Mediterranean favorites like spinach, onions, tomatoes, beans, walnuts and olive oil just happen to be extremely rich sources of these micronutrients, "which are like a medicine that comes from your grocery cart instead of your medicine cabinet," he says. Their main superpower is stopping and reversing age-related damage in our cells. If we pump enough polyphenols into our system over time, we think more clearly, move more freely and fight off disease more easily. "Everything should start to function better."

As for how polyphenols stimulate weight loss, there are lots of ways. Perhaps most important, they seem to spur our body to burn blood sugar faster. There's also evidence they block enzymes that let us turn food into blood sugar in the first place. It's  an effect that ultimately slashes both sugar and the fat-storage hormone insulin. And as excess insulin comes down, we can immediately burn more fat, “especially from our middle,” says the doc.