Skipping Meals Lays On The Belly Fat

Skipping meals could lead to abdominal weight gain, according to a new study on mice from Ohio State University. Mice that ate one large meal and fasted the rest of the day developed the pre-diabetic condition of insulin resistance in their livers.

This means the liver stops responding to insulin, continuing to produce glucose, which leads to a surplus of sugar in the blood. That extra sugar is stored as energy-storing white fat, which is less desirable than its counterpart, energy-burning brown fat.

In the begining, these same mice were fed a restricted diet and lose weight while a control group was given free-for-all access to food. Mice that had dieted gained back most of the weight they had lost, nearly catching up to the control group by the study’s end.

Even though they didn’t gain back the entirely of teh weight they lost, the mouse equivalent to human belly fat weighed more for  those that had dieted.

This kind of fat, in addition to being unsightly, is associated with the very kind of insulin resistance described above in additiion to increased risk for type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

But this is not an excuse to graze all day, either.

Human nutrition professor Martha Belury of Ohio State says her findings do not, in any way, support the notion that eating multiple small meals over the course of a day could help a person lose weight.

“But you definitely don’t want to skip meals to save calories because it sets your body up for larger fluctuations in insulin and glucose and could be setting you up for more fat gain instead of fat loss,” she says.

Even though mice were used, Belury says the behaviour of the group  that dieted matched that of human dieters. The group developed gorging behaviour as a result of calories deprivation the eventually made them so full they would go as long as 20 hours without food.

This bingeing-and-fasting behaviour turned the mice’s metabolism topsy-turvy and the research team believes it caused insulin production to spike and subsequently plummet.

These same mice exhibited increased inflammation and higher activation of genes that promote fat storing, according to the study, published in The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry.

“Under conditions when the liver is not stimulated by insulin, increased glucose output from the liver means the liver isn’t responding to signals telling it to shut down glucose production,” says Belury.

“These mice don’t have type 2 diabetes yet, but they’re not responding to insulin any more and that state of insulin resistance is reffered to as pre-diabetes.”- AFP-Relaxnews

Article source: The sun

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