In case you have ever tried to lose weight by skipping meals thinking that this will help you lose weight a news study has showed that this is not at all a good solution. The study which was published in The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry suggests that skipping meals leads to fat accumulation around your waist and signs of prediabetes.
The research was conducted on mice. The team of researchers, which also included members from the Ohio State University in Columbus, found out that mice which skipped meals experienced metabolic miscues which generated even more abdominal weight.
The investigators tried to initiate gorging behavior in the rodents. The mice in the control group were given their daily food ration once a day and they nibbled all day. The mice in the intervention group were at first given a diet with restricted calorie. In the first three days their daily food intake had half the calories of the food the controls consumed. That’s how the researchers initiate gorging behavior: the mice ate all their food at one and afterwards fasted.
Over the next three days the gorging mice were little by little given more and more food until their rations were the same as the rations of the control mice. However the gorging and fasting pattern was the same. Unlike the controls they did not return to nibbling. What they did was eat all the food in four hours and afterwards fast for 20 hours.
The gorging mice displayed signs of developing insulin resistance in the livers. When the liver becomes more sensitive to insulin the amount of glucose produced is more than the body needs. As a consequence there will be too much sugar in the blood and the excess will be stored as fat. The results were that despite the fact that the mice had the same weight, gorging mice had more belly fat.
Professor Martha Belury, the senior author of the study, said that the findings of this research indicate that the idea according to which consuming small meals throughout the day can help lose weight may be good. She also remarked:
“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.”
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