tiktok tuesday: coffee with a breast milk enzyme?

the videos take the typical form of a too-good-to-be-true weight loss idea, with women in various stages of undress. cut to a clip of someone mixing what looks to be instant coffee, hot water, and freshly squeezed lemon juice. when we go back to the woman, she now has several inches shaved off her waistline with a subtitle indicating how quickly the transformation took place: “34 days” or “95 days.”  

an investigation of one such tiktok account , which has amassed more than 6,000 followers and almost 540,000 total likes in total, brings up a link that leads to — no surprise here — a website for an “enzyme coffee for weight loss.” the coffee costs the equivalent of about $28 or a box of seven packs, and they ship to canada.  

but where things get really interesting is their description of how this coffee works. among the standard claims that a proprietary blend of vitamins and extracts will increase alertness, improve immunity and increase metabolism, is the explanation that the coffee also contains enzymes purified from breast milk , which will apparently aid in weight loss.  

while there are enzymes in breast milk that help with the digestion of fat and carbohydrates, this website doesn’t say which enzyme or what it does. however, they do claim that the enzyme “ promotes the oxidative decomposition of fatty acids into mitochondria.” long chain fatty acids, these producers claim, are “blocked” from entering the mitochondria and therefore cannot be broken down by the body.  

this is false.  

our bodies have a natural process to digest fat and turn it into energy. this complex process, called the β-oxidation cycle , breaks down long fatty acid chains so they can be used by the body to create energy. while the length of the fatty-acid chain does impact how quickly the molecule is broken down, the body has adapted to be able to use a variety of different fat molecules — no supplement needed.  

there are a multitude of other enzymes found in breast milk that do help infants’ metabolisms in various ways, like amylase that breaks down carbs, lipase that breaks down fat, and protease that breaks down proteins. all these enzymes, however, are produced naturally by our own body — so supplements aren’t usually necessary for adults, unless a deficiency has been identified by a doctor.

if babies drink it, should you?   breast milk as a health supplement — or shock marketing tactic — is not a new phenomenon. in 2015, lady gaga famously threatened to sue a london ice cream shop for naming their breast-milk ice cream “baby gaga.” one episode of the netflix docu-series (un)well followed bodybuilders who swore that breast milk was the key to their mad gains.  

there are a significant number of nutrients, enzymes and other elements in breast milk that bolster a baby’s immune system and help their digestive systems to function until their bodies are developed enough to produce their own. one-tenth of a litre of breast milk has been shown to contain 0.9 to 1.2 g of protein, 3.2 to 3.6 g of fat and 6.7 to 7.8 g of lactose – not bad for nature’s own protein drink.  

while some doctors are open to the concept that drinking human breast milk may provide an immune boost to adults who can stomach it, un-pasteurized, un-regulated breast milk can be dangerous to consume. health canada warns that breast milk can contain hiv and other communicable diseases, or trace amounts of medications and non-prescription drugs. the quality of the breast milk depends on the health of the donor.

collection, storage, and delivery of breast milk can also be dicey. one study found evidence of bacterial or viral contamination in more than quarters of breast milk samples that researchers purchased online.  

“we were surprised so many samples had such high bacterial counts and even fecal contamination in the milk, most likely from poor hand hygiene. we were also surprised a few samples contained salmonella,” said sarah a. keim, phd , principal investigator in the center for biobehavioral health at nationwide children’s hospital in ohio. “other harmful bacteria may have come from the use of either unclean containers or unsanitary breast milk pump parts.”  

if weight loss is your goal, it’s probably safer to stick to the traditional healthy diet and exercise.  

emjones@postmedia.com |  @jonesyjourn

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