May not help you lose weight
The low-fat, lean foods we choose in an effort to maintain stable or lower our body weight, may have the opposite of the desired effect because they confuse the body, according to a new study.
When tasting a lite snack, the body prepares to receive a lot of calories, but ends up running on very little – and this causes confusion and makes it seek more food.
This finding partly explains why obesity is still spreading in the Western world, despite the extensive use of lite foods by millions of people worldwide.
The substitution of part of the food with foods that have similar taste but fewer or zero calories, looks like a very sensible approach to weight loss.
However, many different biological mechanisms are factored in. These substituents mimic the taste of fat, but do not provide calories – and this causes confusion in the body.
The various flavors naturally stimulate your body to expect to be supplied with calories, which it will then digest.
When this does not happen, the body perceives it as a problem of the control mechanism of food intake and activates other mechanisms to compensate for this dysfunction.
Researchers studied the variations in body weight in a group of rats. Half the animals ate full-fat bread sticks for 28 days, while the rest ate normal breadsticks for a few days and then began to feed on the lite version. At the end of four weeks, the rats that had changed diet weighed more and had more body fat than than those who ate low fat bread sticks until the end of the study.
The researchers noted that even though this study was done in animal models, there are many similarities with humans. The findings call into question the effectiveness of using fat substitutes in a long-term strategic control of body weight.