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Making sudden and drastic changes to your diet can be a terrible idea. According to a study presented at the meeting of Experimental Biology (EB) 2022fluctuations in body weight resulting from drastically reducing and increasing calories could lead to physiological changes that increase the risk of heart disease or diabetes in the long term.
Carried out in rats, the study offers insight into likely long-term impacts of diets aimed at weight lossLike yo-yo dieting.
Most previous work in people and animals has focused on the short-term impacts of weight loss, but researchers say less is known about how cycles of weight loss and gain can affect health over time. long term.
On this occasion, researchers at Georgetown University in Washington (USA) divided 16 rats into two groups. The first received a normal amount of food throughout the study, while the other experienced three cycles of a restricted diet (60% of their normal daily food intake) followed by three weeks of a normal diet.
At the end of the study, the researchers used ultrasound to assess the rats’ heart and kidney function and blood tests to assess insulin sensitivity, a measure of how well the body processes sugar.
“We found that animals that experienced several cycles of body weight loss and regain had worse heart and kidney function. They also had greater resistance to insulin, which may be a cause of diabetes,” says Aline MA de Souza, first author of the study.
That is, he explains, “although the animals appear to be healthy after ‘recovery’ from the diet, their heart and metabolism are not» .
“The data supports the need for more research in humans to find out if people who cycle very restrictive diets to lose weight are at increased risk of developing heart problems later in life,” says de Souza.
However, “we still need to do more studies in this field, but the findings suggest that the more restrictive the diet, the worse the health outcomes may be,” he adds.
In his opinion, weight-loss diets need “careful review for long-term health effects, especially if rapid weight loss is considered as an option.”
While more research is needed to determine the biological mechanisms behind the findings and determine whether the patterns seen in rats translate to people, the researchers speculate that changes in gene expression in response to calorie restriction could alter biological pathways that regulate blood pressure and insulin metabolism.
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