Scientists identify dietary fat as a cause of obesity in mce

July 13, 2018

What we eat plays a big role in our ability to regulate our body weight. Over time, however, different ideas have emerged about the most important dietary factors that make us gain weight.

During the 1980s and 1990s, it was widely accepted that the most important factor in weight gain was the fat content of our body. regimes. However, in the new millennium, it was suggested that this focus on fat was misplaced and that, in fact, the main factor responsible for obesity was our carbohydrate intake – particularly our intake of refined carbohydrates such as sugars.

However, attention has recently focused on proteins, with the badumption that people eat food primarily to obtain protein rather than energy.

this idea, when the protein content of our diet falls, we eat more food to meet our target protein intake. This makes us consume too many calories and we get fat. Since our food consists of fats, proteins and carbohydrates – and at different times, all three have been involved in our obesity – it's hard to know what to eat to stay slim.

Part of the problem is that it is very difficult to do studies in humans that control food intake long enough to determine which dietary factors lead to weight gain. Studies of animals similar to us, however, may suggest possible answers.

Scientists from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland conducted the largest study of the kind. solve what the components of the diet cause mice to put on body fat. The study was published today in the journal Cell Metabolism .

The study included 30 different diets that varied in their fat, carbohydrate (sugar) and protein content. Mice of five different strains were fed for 3 months, which equates to 9 years in humans.

In total, more than 100,000 measurements were made on the body weights of the mice. . The result of this huge study was unequivocal – the only thing that got the mice fattened was to eat more fat in their diet. Carbohydrates, including up to 30% of calories from sugar, had no effect.

The combination of sugar and fat does not have more impact than fat alone. There was no evidence that a low protein content (up to 5% of total calories) stimulates greater ingestion, suggesting that there is no no protein target. Researchers believe that dietary fat has caused weight gain because dietary fat only stimulates reward centers in the brain, resulting in higher caloric intake.

Professor John Speakman, who led the study, said: However, mice have many similarities with humans in their physiology and metabolism, and we will never study where the Human diets are controlled in the same way for such long periods. Thus, the evidence that it provides is a good indication that the effects of different diets are likely to be in humans. "