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Eating two and a half times more than you should will leave you overweight and prone to type 2 diabetes, although no one is entirely sure why. Now a team that fed volunteers a whopping 6000 calories a day have found some clues.
Obesity is only one problem caused by eating too much. An overly large food intake can also increase a person’s risk of diabetes, heart disease and some cancers, but no one is sure why this should be the case.
Resistance to the hormone insulin seems to play a role. When a healthy person eats a meal, their blood glucose levels rise, and the body responds by making insulin. This hormone prompts the body to store un-needed glucose, but people who develop insulin resistance are not able to absorb excess glucose in the same way. This means that, after eating, their blood glucose levels remain high, and over time, this can damage the kidneys, nervous system and heart, for example.
Guenther Boden and [url=http://www.temple.edu/medicine/faculty/m/meralis.asp?pms=(merali S[au] Temple University[affiliation]]Salim Merali[/url] at Temple University, Philadelphia, and their team set out to investigate how overeating might lead to insulin resistance.
They fed six healthy male volunteers 6000 calories’ worth of food every day for a week – around two and a half times what they should have been eating. “It was a regular, American diet, composed of pizzas, hamburgers and that sort of thing,” says Merali. Each volunteer stayed at a hospital for the duration of the experiment, where they were bed-bound, carefully monitored and prevented from doing any sort of exercise.
“They took to the diet, and liked it,” says Boden. While 6000 calories sounds like a lot, it’s not more than some athletes consume while training, he says. Unsurprisingly, his inactive volunteers started to put on weight. By the end of the week, each volunteer was around 3.5 kilograms heavier than when they started.
Full article here: https://www.newscientist.com/
Obesity is only one problem caused by eating too much. An overly large food intake can also increase a person’s risk of diabetes, heart disease and some cancers, but no one is sure why this should be the case.
Resistance to the hormone insulin seems to play a role. When a healthy person eats a meal, their blood glucose levels rise, and the body responds by making insulin. This hormone prompts the body to store un-needed glucose, but people who develop insulin resistance are not able to absorb excess glucose in the same way. This means that, after eating, their blood glucose levels remain high, and over time, this can damage the kidneys, nervous system and heart, for example.
Guenther Boden and [url=http://www.temple.edu/medicine/faculty/m/meralis.asp?pms=(merali S[au] Temple University[affiliation]]Salim Merali[/url] at Temple University, Philadelphia, and their team set out to investigate how overeating might lead to insulin resistance.
They fed six healthy male volunteers 6000 calories’ worth of food every day for a week – around two and a half times what they should have been eating. “It was a regular, American diet, composed of pizzas, hamburgers and that sort of thing,” says Merali. Each volunteer stayed at a hospital for the duration of the experiment, where they were bed-bound, carefully monitored and prevented from doing any sort of exercise.
“They took to the diet, and liked it,” says Boden. While 6000 calories sounds like a lot, it’s not more than some athletes consume while training, he says. Unsurprisingly, his inactive volunteers started to put on weight. By the end of the week, each volunteer was around 3.5 kilograms heavier than when they started.
Full article here: https://www.newscientist.com/
