High Fat Diets “Wire” You to Eat More
Jun 29th, 2008 | By admin | Category: Weight LossFatty foods: so good, yet so evil. Apparently REAL evil, according to a recent Journal of Nutrition study.
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University found that rats who were consistently fed a high fat diet tended to eat more of a fatty snack than their low fat diet brethren, and it is believed that a hormone called cholecystokinin (CCK) is to blame.
CCK is secreted by the small intestine and aids in the digestion of fats and proteins. It also serves as one of the “satiety signals,” telling the brain when an individual is full and should stop eating. This study first looked at both high and low groups and how they performed with their normal amounts of CCK and their fatty snacks. The high fat diet crowd ate more of their snack than the low fat crowd. Researchers then gave a dose of CCK to both groups halfway through their snacks, sort of a CCK boost. The low fat diet group stopped eating, while the high fat group kept shoveling it in.
What this essentially shows is that, in rats at least, those on a high fat diet can become desensitized to CCK. In other words, the fast food rat doesn’t have a trigger in his brain to tell him when he’s full, resulting in sort of a self-perpetuating cycle. Additional studies in the past suggest that this sort of phenomenon works on humans as well.
While it sounds a bit clichéd, this is just further proof of the following: it’s not just how much you eat, but what you eat.
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