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Todays’ menu:

Research:

1) High Protein Diets: Can Exercise Undo the Damage?

2) Weight Loss Drugs: Are They Worth the Risk?

3) Prebiotics: The New Way to Tame Your Sweet Tooth

🏋️ High Protein Diets: can exercise undo the damage?

💪 Strength training for all

High-protein diets promote muscle growth and strength in active but not in sedentary people.

In sedentary people, excess protein has no metabolic use and can increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and other metabolic complications.

But what happens when sedentary people on high-protein diets start exercising?

Researchers tested this in animals. They divided mice into four groups:

· Group 1: Low-protein diet, no strength training

· Group 2: Low-protein diet, strength training

· Group 3: High-protein diet, no strength training

· Group 4: High-protein diet, strength training

Strength training consisted of pulling a cart with increasing weight three times per week for three months. No strength training meant pulling an empty cart for the same time period.

The researchers found that a high-protein diet impaired metabolic health in sedentary mice that did not exercise. Sedentary mice gained more fat than mice on a low-protein diet.

However, in mice that exercised, a high-protein diet led to faster muscle growth and strength, especially in the forearms. It also protected the animals from gaining fat. However, exercise did not protect the mice from the effects of high protein on blood sugar control.

🏠 Take home message

Although we cannot generalize results from animal studies to humans, there are some lessons to be learned.

1. Resistance exercise protects against high-protein-induced fat gain in animals.

2. Sedentary people on a high-protein diet might benefit from either reducing their protein intake or doing more resistance exercise.

3. Second, and more importantly, not all calories are created equal. Calories from protein, when in excess and in a sedentary lifestyle, have a different impact on health than calories from other macro nutrients. However, strength training can mitigate this impact.

Therefore, high-protein diets are beneficial as long as they are combined with exercise. On their own, high protein intake may be counterproductive.

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⚖️ Weight Loss Drugs: are they worth the risk?

💉 Just for some

Why struggle with diet and exercise when there are weight loss drugs?

Glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) agonists are medications approved for the treatment of diabetes that have recently also been used off-label for weight loss. Examples include Ozempic and Wegovy.

However, these medications may come with a higher risk of severe gastrointestinal problems.

A new study of non-diabetic patients taking these medications for weight loss found that GLP-1 drugs were associated with a higher risk of developing stomach paralysis, bowel obstruction, and pancreas infections than other weight loss drugs.

🏠 Take home message

It is easier to take a drug that can help you lose weight than to have the personal responsibility of making lifestyle changes.

However, the risk-benefit ratio for taking GLP-1 weight loss drugs is very different for non-diabetic people than for diabetic people.

Weight loss is most people's goal, but let's not forget that diet and exercise have significant benefits beyond just weight loss. For example, they benefit your gut health, hormonal health, and cardiovascular health.

While weight loss can help in all of these areas, aiming for weight loss at the expense of other types of health is not a long-term solution.

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🦷 Prebiotics: The new way to tame your sweet tooth?

🧠 Rewire your brain

The gut can influence your food choices. How peculiar is that?

A study tested this in overweight volunteers using prebiotics (fermentable fibres). These volunteers, who followed a standard omnivorous Western diet, were asked to consume 30 grams per day of inulin (a prebiotic from chicory root) for 14 days.

For context, 30 grams per day of fermentable fibre is a high dose and very uncommon in the Western diet. After 2 weeks, they were then shown pictures of food and asked how much they desired to eat the meals, all while functional MRI imaging was used to check different levels of brain activity.

When the participants were asked to evaluate high-calorie foods, there was comparatively less activation of reward-related brain areas. This effect was accompanied by a shift in the composition of the gut bacteria.

🏠 Take home message

Functional microbial changes may change how the brain responds to food cues. So, consumption of high-dose prebiotics leads to a reduction in reward-related brain activation in response to high-calorie food stimuli. This is great news for appetite control!

There is speculation on how this works, but there are some potential suspects:

• Fermentable fibres distend your gut when fermented (because of gas), and this stretching is sensed as "being full" and helps lower hunger levels when looking at food.

• Fermentable fibres slow stomach emptying. As digestion is slowed down, you are fuller for longer.

• Fermentable fibres slow and reduce the absorption of sugars and fats. As you are less likely to experience blood sugar spikes and crashes, you are less likely to want high-calorie foods to stabilize your blood sugar levels.

Be mindful that this study only lasted 2 weeks, and we don't know the mechanism behind this gut-brain axis control. We don't know if these changes can be sustained over time, whether or not consumption of prebiotics continues. Experience says these changes only last as long as consumption of fibre is kept high.

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😂 And finally!

Support bacteria!? It’s the only culture some people have 😂

To your health!

Paolo

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