Is your diet making you lazy?
A professor at UBC-Okanagan is suggesting the cooking oil people consume may undermine efforts to stay healthy.
Sanjoy Ghosh has recently published research concluding eating lots of polyunsaturated fatty acids can lead to sedentary lifestyles, especially for females.
Convenience foods such as potato chips, energy bars, crackers and burgers are made with common cooking oils that are rich in PUFAs.
They include corn, sunflower and soybean oils as well as margarine.
“This data is extremely significant,” says Ghosh in a media release. “Nobody has made this connection and it’s time for an intervention. And if someone is beginning an exercise program without taking a close look at the fats, especially PUFA they are consuming, or changing what they’re eating, then it might be doomed to failure.”
Ghosh says his study, in collaboration with UBC biologist Jason Pither, provides evidence dietary PUFA is strongly associated with sedentary behaviour among European pre-teen girls.
There is a weak association with diabetes in adult women.
Ghosh is recommending more trials and studies to confirm his findings.