COLUMBUS, Ohio – Skipping meals may help with short-term weight loss, but in the long run it can send the wrong signals to your body, leading to an increase in the abdominal fat linked to Type II diabetes, according to a new study by researchers at Ohio State and other universities.
The study in mice found that skipping meal sets off a series of “metabolic miscues” that can result in the body’s storing surplus sugar as fat, according to the study’s lead author, Martha Belury, OSU professor of human nutrition.
In the study, mice that ate all of their food as a single meal and fasted the rest of the day developed insulin resistance in their livers when the liver doesn’t respond to signals telling it to stop producing glucose. Belury says that extra sugar in the blood is stored as fat around the midsection of the mice, the equivalent of human belly fat..
“That makes for a happy fat cell – but it’s not the one you want to have. We want to shrink these cells to reduce fat tissue,” she said.
The mice initially were put on a restricted diet and lost weight compared to mice with unlimited access to food but the restricted-diet mice regained weight as calories were added back into their diets, Belury said.
But fat around their middles – “white adipose tissue” — which stores energy weighed more than in the mice that were free to nibble all day long, supporting the notion that small meals throughout the day can be helpful for weight loss, Belury said.
She admits eating small meals several times day may not be practical for many people “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.”
The research is published online in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry.
Even when their food supply was restored, Belury says the mice that had been on restricted diets developed what she called “gorging behavior” that persisted throughout the study, meaning they finished their day’s worth of food in about four hours and then ended up fasting for the next 20 hours.
The researchers saw 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, Belury said.
“If you’re pumping out more sugar into the blood, adipose is happy to pick up glucose and store it,” she said.