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When you are frantically busy and trying to meet a deadline at work of just trying to get the kids out the door in the morning, the temptation to skip a meal and have something later is pretty strong.
But missing meals on a regular basis might have long-reaching and potentially devastating consequences, says a new study published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry.
Skipping meals, says the study from researchers at Ohio State University, sets off a series of metabolic slipups in the body that can result in weight gain around the stomach.
The research team gave laboratory mice all their daily food in one meal. The mice then fasted the rest of the day.
After just six days, the mice developed insulin resistance in their livers — which scientists consider a sign of pre-diabetes.
And when the liver doesn’t respond to insulin signals telling it to stop producing glucose, that extra sugar in the blood is stored as fat.
However, the sting in this study lays in what the scientists did to prepare the mice. Initially, the mice were put on a restricted-kilojoule diet, forcing them to lose weight. Then, as the kilojoules were reintroduced to the diet, the mice began to gain weight.
But the weight gain was predominantly around their middle – the mouse equivalent of a fat tummy.
An excess of that kind of fat is associated with insulin resistance and risk for type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Additionally they developed gorging behaviours – the equivalent of binging and fasting in humans.
The gorging and fasting in these mice affected a host of metabolic measures that the researchers attributed to a spike and then severe drop in insulin production.
In mice that gorged and then fasted, the researchers saw elevations in inflammation, higher activation of genes that promote storage of fatty molecules and plumper fat cells — especially in the abdominal area — compared to the mice that nibbled all day.
“This does support the notion that small meals throughout the day can be helpful for weight loss, though that may not be practical for many people,” said Martha Belury, professor of human nutrition at Ohio State University and lead author of the study.
“But you definitely don’t want to skip meals to save calories because it sets your body up for larger fluctuations in insulin and glucose and could be setting you up for more fat gain instead of fat loss.”
