Intermitent fasting has been gaining popularity in health circles, and is touted as a boon for weight loss and metabolism. A new study published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, however, is questioning all that.
Researchers at Ohio State University put mice in to two groups; a test group and a control. The control group was given unlimited access to food; mice could nibble freely throughout the day. The test group, however, started out on a restricted calorie diet. The mice, as expected, lost weight. When more food was reintroduced to the test group, the mice gained the weight back and weighed nearly the same as the control group. However, researchers noticed that the test group were gaining more weight around their midsections than the control group.
It also ended up that the mice who had been restricted of calories developed gorging behaviors, eating their day’s worth of food in about four hours and then fasting for 20 until their next meal.
“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,” said Martha Belury, professor of human nutrition at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study. “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.”
The researchers noted increased inflammation, higher activation of genes that promote storage of fat in the abdominal area in the gorging mice, and markers of insulin resistance. They attributed this to the spike and severe drop in insulin production.
“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,” Belury said. “These mice don’t have type 2 diabetes yet, but they’re not responding to insulin anymore and that state of insulin resistance is referred to as prediabetes.”
“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.
So your mom may have been right; breakfast may be the most important meal of your day, as skipping it could cause you to gorge later, leading to insulin resistance, inflammation, and weight gain. It also highlights the possible damage that yo-yo dieting can do to your body, and calls in to question the safety of the practice of intermittent fasting.