If you’re skipping meals in an attempt to lose weight, you’re doing it all wrong, U.S. researchers say. In new research, they suggest that passing on breakfast, lunch or dinner only wreaks havoc on your metabolism, leaving you with extra weight around your waist.
Ohio State University scientists worked with mice for their study: the rodents were fed a single meal and fasted the rest of the day. But when they did so, they developed insulin resistance in their livers – a warning sign for prediabetes.
If the liver ignores insulin signals telling it to stop producing glucose, the extra sugar ends up as stored fat, the researchers warn.
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It was the mice who ate once a day that had more fat around their middles – what would be the equivalent of human belly fat – compared to their peers that grazed on food all day.
“This does support the notion that small meals throughout the day can be helpful for weight loss, though that may not be practical for many people,” Dr. Martha Belury, the lead professor in the study, said in a statement.
“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 warned.
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Her team noted similarities between the mice on diets and people who were battling weight loss. The mice that were fed on restricted diets would receive half of the calories their peers got to eat. Calories were gradually worked into their diet so that by day six, both groups of rodents were eating the same amount of food.
The mice that had to cut back changed the way they ate, though. They’d binge on food throughout the study, eating all of their food in a span of four hours. After that, they had to fast for the remainder of the day.
“With the mice, this is basically binging and then fasting. People don’t necessarily do that over a 24-hour period but some do eat just one large meal a day,” Belury said.
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When the rodents binged and then fasted, they had a spike and steep drop in insulin production, they had inflammation, a higher activation of genes that promote storage of fatty molecules and they had plumper fat cells.
Glucose lingered in their bloodstream longer, meaning their livers weren’t in touch with the rest of their bodies and producing too much insulin.
“Even though the gorging and fasting mice had about the same body weights as control mice, their adipose depots were heavier. If you’re pumping out more sugar into the blood, adipose is happy to pick up glucose and store it. That makes for a happy fat cell – but it’s not the one you want to have. We want to shrink these cells to reduce fat tissue,” Belury said.
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Her findings were published this week in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry.
carmen.chai@globalnews.ca
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