Category: Weight Loss

As NAFLD treatments are limited, scientists looked into whether diet and exercise can improve patients’ lives.

Five days a week of alternate-day fasting along with exercise for three months is a good treatment for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), a study reveals.

Nutrition researchers compared the effects of fasting or exercise alone with alternate day fasting and exercise.

Patients with NAFLD who were also obese saw significant improvements in their health after following a 3-month alternate-day fasting diet with moderate-intensity aerobic exercise.

Their diet plan consisted of 500 calories a day and eating with no restrictions next day along with five hours aerobic exercise every week.

Participants experienced reductions in weight and waist circumference, improvements in insulin sensitivity, reduced fat in the liver, and decreased alanine transaminase (an enzyme in the liver and a marker of liver damage) levels.

Warning signs of NAFLD

Accumulation of fat in the liver can cause non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), a condition seen in overweight or obese people.

NAFLD is not caused by alcohol, but if untreated could lead to cirrhosis resembling the liver damage from too much drinking.

NAFLD patients are more likely to develop insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, also many obese adults have this condition.

The condition if not treated can lead to more serious issues such as inflammation, fibrosis, cirrhosis, and liver failure.

The warning signs appear when it progresses to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) or fibrosis in which the liver has become inflamed.

A person with NASH may feel:

• extremely tired,
• fatigued,
• a pain in the top-right of the belly over the lower-right side of the ribs,
• and losing weight for no reason.

Diet and exercise

As NAFLD treatments are limited, scientists looked into whether diet and exercise can improve patients’ lives.

Professor Krista Varady, the study’s co-author, said:

“When we compared the results of our study groups, we saw clearly that the most improved patients were in the group that followed the alternate-day fasting diet and exercised five days a week.

The people who only dieted or only exercised did not see the same improvements, which reinforces the importance of these two relatively inexpensive lifestyle modifications on overall health and on combating chronic diseases like fatty liver disease.”

The authors highlighted:

“Our findings also indicate that the combination intervention was effective for reducing body weight, fat mass, waist circumference, ALT, fasting insulin, insulin resistance, and increasing insulin sensitivity, among patients with obesity and NAFLD, versus controls.”

Avoiding drug side-effects

Besides improvements of metabolic indicators, alternate day fasting and exercise appeared to be safe thus the authors think it is a good option for those who want to overcome NAFLD without taking drugs that have side-effects.

Professor Varady said:

“Alternate-day fasting and exercise interventions can be difficult for people to stick to and in prior studies we have seen significant dropout.

It was very interesting to see that in this trial we had very high adherence to the interventions.”

Foods and beverages containing alcohol or sugar can aggravate the condition, so the advice is to limit intake.

Related

• Drinking any type of coffee — no matter if it is caffeinated or decaf, instant or ground coffee — has been linked to lowering the odds of liver disease and related liver problems.
• The Mediterranean diet has been shown to protect subjects from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).

The study was published in the journal Cell Metabolism (Ezpeleta et al., 2022).

A weight loss fruit that makes you feel full, improves your gut health, and reduces absorption of fats.

Having an avocado every day as part of your diet increases healthy gut bacteria and reduce the absorption of fat.

The fruit is rich in fibre and monounsaturated fat, a healthy fat that lowers “bad” LDL cholesterol in the blood.

A study has found that people who eat avocados have higher levels of the gut microbes responsible for breaking down fibres and producing a number of metabolites (short-chain fatty acids) that improve gut health.

Ms Sharon Thompson, the study’s first author, said:

“We know eating avocados helps you feel full and reduces blood cholesterol concentration, but we did not know how it influences the gut microbes, and the metabolites the microbes produce.

Microbial metabolites are compounds the microbes produce that influence health.

Avocado consumption reduced bile acids and increased short chain fatty acids.

These changes correlate with beneficial health outcomes.”

Bile acids are produced by the liver, stored in the gallbladder, and released into the intestine for breaking down fats from foods we eat.

Western diets are higher in fats causing more production of bile acids which can alert the gut microbiota population and cause intestinal inflammation.

The study recruited 163 overweight or obese participants and divided them into two groups, both receiving a normal diet.

The only difference was that one ate fresh avocados (175 g for men or 140 g for women) as part of a meal every day for 12 weeks and the other group had a similar diet but no avocados.

Dr Hannah Holscher, study co-author, said:

“Our goal was to test the hypothesis that the fats and the fiber in avocados positively affect the gut microbiota.

We also wanted to explore the relationships between gut microbes and health outcomes.

Despite avocados being high in fat, the avocado group absorbed less fat compared to the other group.

Dr Holscher said:

“Greater fat excretion means the research participants were absorbing less energy from the foods that they were eating.

This was likely because of reductions in bile acids, which are molecules our digestion system secretes that allow us to absorb fat.

We found that the amount of bile acids in stool was lower and the amount of fat in the stool was higher in the avocado group.”

Types of fats found in foods affect the gut microbiome differently, for example, avocados contain monounsaturated fats which are considered heart-healthy.

On top of that, avocados are high in soluble fibre: an average avocado contains 12 g of fibres which is a big portion of the daily recommended fibre intake (28 to 34 g).

Dr Holscher said:

“Less than 5% of Americans eat enough fiber.

Most people consume around 12 to 16 grams of fiber per day.

Thus, incorporating avocados in your diet can help get you closer to meeting the fiber recommendation.

Eating fiber isn’t just good for us; it’s important for the microbiome, too.

We can’t break down dietary fibers, but certain gut microbes can.

When we consume dietary fiber, it’s a win-win for gut microbes and for us.”

People shouldn’t worry that avocados are high in calories as it is more important that it is a nutrient-dense food that contains micronutrients like fibre and potassium that we don’t get enough of.

Related

• Avocados contain a fat molecule that could help prevent diabetes and maintain a healthy weight.

The study was published in The Journal of Nutrition (Thompson et al., 2020).

Reduce your belly fat 10 percent with a half cup of this food.

Lowering sugar consumption by about one can of soda and adding one half-cup of fibre-rich foods daily reduces abdominal fat and type 2 diabetes risk.

A study has found that decreasing about 47 grams of sugar intake per day — equivalent to a can of soda — lowers insulin secretion, on average, by 33 percent.

Increasing fibre intake by 5 grams a day — the amount in a half cup of beans — results in a 10 percent reduction of belly fat.

Visceral fat is a type of body fat stored within the abdominal area and internal organs.

This type of fat causes abdominal obesity and is also associated with several health problems, like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Dr Emily Ventura and colleagues conducted a 16-week study on overweight Latino adolescents who were between 12 to 19 years old.

They tested if increasing fiber consumption and decreasing sugar intake have an effect on type 2 diabetes risk factors.

The study’s authors wrote:

“A reduction in visceral fat indicates a reduction in risk for type 2 diabetes, considering that to a greater degree than total body fat, visceral fat [fat surrounding the internal organs] has been shown to be negatively associated with insulin sensitivity.”

Those who increased fiber intake had a significant reduction in body mass index (-2 percent vs. 2 percent) and visceral adipose tissue (-10 percent vs. no change) compared with those who decreased fiber intake.”

Being overweight or obese are serious issues affecting adults and children around the world.

The World Health Organization reports that in 2016 over 1.9 billion adults were overweight and more than 650 million adults were obese.

The authors of this study wrote:

“Our results suggest that intensive interventions may not be necessary to achieve modifications in sugar and fiber intake.

Accordingly, nutritional guidance given in the primary care or community setting may be sufficient to promote the suggested dietary changes in some individuals.

In addition, policies that promote reduced intake of added sugar and increased intake of fiber could be effective public health strategies for the prevention of type 2 diabetes in this high-risk population.”

The study was published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (Ventura et al., 2009).

A glass of this drink a day can double weight loss.

Drinking a glass of fat-free milk each day can double weight loss, research finds.

People sometimes steer clear of dairy because they believe it is fattening — actually, the reverse may be true.

Milk contains both vitamin D and calcium, which have both been linked to weight loss.

About 50 percent of people are deficient in vitamin D and around 50 percent of obese people have a calcium deficiency.

Low calcium levels may prompt the brain to increase food intake to get more of this mineral.

One study tested the effects of drinking milk after weight-lifting.

Twenty women carried out resistance training, then drank either a sugary sports drink or a pint of fat-free milk.

Professor Stu Phillips, study co-author, said:

“Resistance training is not a typical choice of exercise for women.

But the health benefits of resistance training are enormous: It boosts strength, bone, muscular and metabolic health in a way that other types of exercise cannot.”

The results of the study showed that milk increased muscle mass and reduced fat.

A previous study has shown the same positive effect of milk on men’s muscles and body fat.

Professor Phillips said:

“We expected the gains in muscle mass to be greater, but the size of the fat loss surprised us.

We’re still not sure what causes this but we’re investigating that now.

It could be the combination of calcium, high-quality protein, and vitamin D may be the key, and, conveniently, all of these nutrients are in milk.”

Although they put on muscle, the women did not gain weight, Professor Phillips said:

“The women who drank milk gained barely any weight because what they gained in lean muscle they balanced out with a loss in fat.

Our data show that simple things like regular weightlifting exercise and milk consumption work to substantially improve women’s body composition and health.”

The study was published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sport and Exercise (Josse et al., 2010).

Psychology study finds way out of exercise-more-then-eat-more trap.

A strange thing happen when people start exercising to lose weight.

Despite burning more calories, they frequently fail to shed the pounds.

One reason people give is that they start eating more.

It makes sense: you burn more calories, so you eat more, so you end up where you started, right?

Which leads to the question: why bother exercising for weight-loss?

The answer is: because it’s fun.

And in this one small word ‘fun’ may be a way out of this vicious circle of exercising more, then eating more.

It’s this thought that inspired Carolina Werle and colleagues to set up an experiment to test the effects on snacking of  ‘doing exercise’ versus just ‘having fun’ (Werle et al., 2014).

To investigate, they asked 56 mostly overweight women to take a half-hour walk, after which they would be served lunch.

But there was a little trick to how this walk was framed:

• Half the women were told it was exercise and that they should monitor their exertion.
• Half were told they were just having fun and they should listen to music on their walk and enjoy themselves.

Afterwards, while relaxing and eating their lunch, and without knowing it, the women demonstrated what the difference was between ‘exercising’ and ‘having fun’.

Not only were women who’d been ‘having fun’ happier and less tired after their walk, but they also ate less pudding and drank less soda.

Overall, despite burning the same amount of calories while walking, women who’d been walking for pleasure ate less afterwards.

The reason for this difference seems to be in how framing exercise affects people’s search for rewards:

“Engaging in a physical activity seems to trigger the search for reward when individuals perceive it as exercise but not when they perceive it as fun.” (Werle et al., 2014).

So the best advice is: stop exercising and go out and have fun.

If you accidentally happen to do some exercise while enjoying yourself, so much the better!

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Study tests if diet or exercise is better for maintaining weight loss.

The best way to maintain weight loss in the long-term is through more exercise rather than less food, research finds.

People in the study maintained weight loss of 30 pounds or more for around ten years by being active.

They did more physical activity and expended more energy each day than those who were obese.

Successful weight loss maintainers did around 12,000 steps each day, compared with 6,500 by obese people.

In other words, successful weight loss maintainers ate more but burned it off through exercise.

Your activity levels matter a lot more than what you eat in the long term, the researchers concluded.

Dr Danielle Ostendorf, the study’s first author, said:

“This study addresses the difficult question of why so many people struggle to keep weight off over a long period.

By providing evidence that a group of successful weight-loss maintainers engages in high levels of physical activity to prevent weight regain — rather than chronically restricting their energy intake — is a step forward to clarifying the relationship between exercise and weight-loss maintenance.”

The study compared successful weight loss maintainers with one group of people with normal body weight and another group who were obese.

Successful weight loss maintainers did twice as many steps as people who were obese, the results showed.

Exercise clearly beat restricting calorie intake for maintaining weight loss.

The results are the same as those from an analysis of people who had been on the reality TV show “The Biggest Loser”.

Again, people who maintained their weight loss did so through increased activity.

Changes in diet had little effect on maintaining weight loss over the years after they finished the show.

Dr Victoria A. Catenacci, study co-author, said:

“Our findings suggest that this group of successful weight-loss maintainers are consuming a similar number of calories per day as individuals with overweight and obesity but appear to avoid weight regain by compensating for this with high levels of physical activity.”

The study was published in the journal Obesity (Ostendorf et al., 2019).

The foods make people feel 30 percent more full.

Pulses — which include peas, beans, lentils and chickpeas — help people lose weight without dieting, multiple studies find.

Adding a single daily serving of foods like these helps people lose weight without making changes to lifestyle or restricting diet.

A serving is three-quarters of a cup.

People in the studies lost weight without counting calories, keeping food diaries or exercising more.

However, adding these standard approaches can improve weight loss further.

Eating pulses is effective for weight loss because it improves feelings of fullness by 31 percent.

This is because the body takes longer to break pulses down (they have a low glycaemic index).

Other pulses include:

• Broad beans,
• runner beans,
• kidney beans,
• black-eyed peas,
• and butter beans.

Dr Russell de Souza, who led the Canadian study, said:

“Despite their known health benefits, only 13 per cent of Canadians eat pulses on any given day and most do not eat the full serving.

So there is room for most of us to incorporate dietary pulses in our diet and realize potential weight management benefits.”

The conclusions come from an analysis of 21 separate clinical trials.

The studies tested the effects of both adding pulses alone as well as restricting calories plus adding pulses.

Naturally, people lost more weight when they restricted their diet and ate more pulses, but pulses on their own were also effective.

On average, people lost around 0.5 pound in six weeks without dieting.

Dr de Souza said:

“Though the weight loss was small, our findings suggest that simply including pulses in your diet may help you lose weight, and we think more importantly, prevent you from gaining it back after you lose it.”

Pulses also help lower levels of bad cholesterol and the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The study was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (Kim et al., 2016).

Certain foods help people sleep better and lose more weight.

A high-protein diet drives weight loss and the burning of belly fat, studies reveal.

Eating more lean meats and low-fat dairy leads to more weight loss than a standard calorie restricted diet, researchers have found.

Protein makes people feel more satisfied so they subsequently eat less.

Diets that have more protein are also linked to better sleep.

Sleeping better can also lead to more weight loss.

For the study, 130 overweight women were put on a calorie restricted diet.

Half, though, ate a restricted diet that was high in protein and dairy.

Dr Ellen Evans, study co-author, said:

“Essentially we substituted lean meats and low-fat milk, cheese, yogurt, etc., for some of the high-carbohydrate foods in the food-pyramid diet.

Participants also ate five servings of vegetables and two to three servings of fruit each day.”

The results showed that the women lost weight without losing bone mass.

Dr Evans said:

“This is an important finding because many people, especially women in mid-life, are concerned with both obesity and osteoporosis.

Furthermore, treating obesity often increases risk for osteoporosis.

Many people lose bone mass when they lose weight.”

People in the high protein group had better bone health despite their weight loss.

Dr Matthew Thorpe, the study’s’ first author, said:

“In the higher-protein group, bone density remained fairly stable, but bone health declined over time in the group that followed the conventional higher-carbohydrate diet.

A statistically significant treatment effect favored the higher-protein diet group.

The combination and/or interaction of dietary protein, calcium from dairy, and the additional vitamin D that fortifies dairy products appears to protect bone health during weight loss.”

The study was published in the Journal of Nutrition (Thorpe et al., 2008).

The supplement is found naturally in many healthy foods.

Some dietary supplements have been shown to improve weight loss by scientific research.

Indeed, one study has shown that inulin can help to quadruple weight loss.

People in the study lost 2.3 percent of their body weight after taking the supplement, compared with just 0.6 percent in the control group.

Inulin is a fibre found naturally in many foods, including leeks, wheat, onions, bananas and asparagus.

The natural fibre — which is also available as a supplement — works by reducing appetite.

It has a creamy consistency and is sometimes used in the food industry as a substitute for fat.

Inulin is low in calories, high in fibre and it can improve the health of the digestion.

Researcher repeatedly finds that an increases in fibre intake can help with weight loss.

The study included 44 overweight people with prediabetes who were tracked for 18 weeks.

Half were given 30g per day of inulin, while the other group were given a placebo.

Both saw the same level of weight loss over the first nine weeks.

But after that, the group taking inulin achieved a weight loss of 2.3 percent of their body weight in comparison to only 0.6 percent in the control group.

The study’s authors write:

“…the consumption of inulin enhances a traditional calorie-restricted lifestyle program.

An added benefit of the inulin supplement was a greater reduction in intrahepatocellular and intramyocellular lipid in the soleus muscle even after accounting for weight lost.”

Inulin seems to work by reducing appetite, the study’s authors write:

“…subjects taking inulin ate significantly less (~270 kcal less, p = 0.027) at the follow-up ad libitum meal, with no consequent rebound in food intake at the 18 week visit despite a total 7 % weight loss in the inulin group, suggesting that inulin’s effect on weight management is mediated via appetite modulation.”

The study was published in the journal Nutrition & Metabolism (Guess et al., 2015).