Fake Fat Makes you Real Fat

ArlVAMom

Another reason to avoid junky snacks, fake fat or real fat.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Diet/eating-fake-fat-makes-real-fat-olestra-study/story?id=13893613

Another diet myth bites the dust: Products containing the calorie-less fake fat Olean, of fat-free potato chips fame, may make you gain weight, not lose it.

In a new study released today by Purdue University, researchers found that rats who were fed Olean-containing potato chips as part of a high-fat diet ate more overall and gained more weight than those who were fed a high fat diet and regular, full-fat potato chips.

This counter-intuitive finding shakes the conventional wisdom that substituting lower calorie, lower fat foods for the full-fat versions will help reduce overall caloric intake and encourage weight loss.

"Fat substitutes can interfere with the body's ability to regulate what it eats, and that can result in overeating," said Susan Swithers, lead author and psychology professor at Purdue University.

But overeating may not be the only reason why fat substitutes make you pack on the pounds. Researchers suspect that fake fats actually mess with our body's ability to digest and metabolize food, making us more likely to retain weight from what we eat.

"Our bodies make predictions on what to prepare to digest based on taste and how food feels in our mouth," Swithers said. When something tastes sweet or fatty, our body gears up to digest a high density of calories, stimulating the metabolism and triggering a chain of hormonal secretions to process the fat, calories, and nutrients.

Olestra snack products, pictured here, use the fake fat substitute Olean to reduce the calorie, cholesterol, and fat content, but eating these diet foods actually leads to weight gain in rats, a new Purdue study finds. Food Addiction: Similar to Drugs and Alcohol? Watch Video

"When we get cues that something is fatty, but no calories arrive -- like with fat substitutes -- our body gets confused," Swithers said. "This confusion can make the body stop preparing to digest fatty food when it does come."

Olean is the brand name for Olestra, a calorieless, fat-free fat-substitute discovered accidentally by Procter & Gamble in 1968. Olestra was approved for use as a food additive in snack foods in 1996 and soon after became famous for its negative gastrointestinal side effects, including intense diarrhea and anal leakage.

High Fat Versus Low Fat Diets and Olestra

In the Purdue study, researchers put rats on either a high fat or low fat diet and allowed them to eat as much as they wanted. The rats were also fed a few grams of potato chips a day: Half the rats received only regular chips, while the other half got a mixture -- some days they got full fat, some days they got fat-free Olestra chips.

Researchers found that rats that ate Olestra-containing chips consumed more of their regular food and gained more weight than those rats that ate the higher-calorie, full-fat potato chips.

At first, this effect didn't seem to hold true for rats on a low-fat diet, until researchers gave these rats access to a high-fat chow. Even though all the rats had stopped being fed potato chips, fat-free or otherwise, those rats that had been consuming Olestra tended to eat more and put on more weight when they were later exposed to a high-fat diet.

This suggests that eating Olestra was changing the way the rats' bodies learned to respond to food, interfering with their natural ability to regulate how much fat was "enough."

"It goes against what you might think -- you remove calories from food and you'll lose weight, but at the end of the day the chemical manipulation of food leads to increased weight. We don't understand exactly why yet, but research continues to show this is true," ABC News Medical contributor Dr. Marie Savard said.

Swithers warned that while rat findings can't be directly applied to humans, rats have very similar biological responses to food as humans. The study was published today in the APA journal Behavioral Neuroscience.

Calls made to Procter & Gamble for comment were not immediately returned.

cobaltis

So a few comments...

They dont link to the actual research (or maybe I am blind), and we know that rats and humans react differently to foods... (the article even cautions this) I would avoid putting too much stock in an article written by a news agency as they often are misleading for the point of attracting attention...

cobaltis

Additional note the rats were fed "ad libitum" which means at their own pleasure, which simply means it may have tasted better so they ate more than they needed but like anyhting we know that eating anything without moderation is pointless. (if they eat 3 times as much food of half the calories they are still erating 50% more calories and it all comes down to calories)

This article is truely useless.

Edit: No Offense was meant to the poster, and I am glad she posted it as it is a good example of the media posting bad information, just trying to prevent bad information from being spread as most people dont catch a lot of the nuances and problems with articles like this. In fact I missed the ad libitum note but a friend caught it when I asked somone to look over the article.

Glucocorticoid

"When we get cues that something is fatty, but no calories arrive -- like with fat substitutes -- our body gets confused," Swithers said. "This confusion can make the body stop preparing to digest fatty food when it does come."

OMG stop confusing the body! IT JUST WANTS TO UNDERSTAND.

ArlVAMom

Here is a link to the abstract of the original research
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&id=B88C3E5A-C986-9B49-ADBB-0B3E8E98337F&resultID=1&page=1&dbTab=pa

here is the citation
Fat substitutes promote weight gain in rats consuming high-fat diets.
Swithers, Susan E.; Ogden, Sean B.; Davidson, Terry L.
Behavioral Neuroscience, Jun 20, 2011, No Pagination Specified. doi: 10.1037/a0024404

here is the abstract
The use of food products designed to mimic the sensory properties of sweet and fat while providing fewer calories has been promoted as a method for reducing food intake and body weight. However, such products may interfere with a learned relationship between the sensory properties of food and the caloric consequences of consuming those foods. In the present experiment, we examined whether use of the fat substitute, olestra, affect energy balance by comparing the effects of consuming high-fat, high-calorie potato chips to the effects of consuming potato chips that sometimes signaled high calories (using high-fat potato chips) and that sometimes signaled lower calories (using nonfat potato chips manufactured with the fat substitute olestra). Food intake, body weight gain and adiposity were greater for rats that consumed both the high-calorie chips and the low-calorie chips with olestra compared to rats that consumed consuming only the high-calorie chips, but only if animals were also consuming a chow diet that was high in fat and calories. However, rats previously exposed to both the high- and low-calorie chips exhibited increased body weight gain, food intake and adiposity when they were subsequently provided with a high fat, high calorie chow diet suggesting that experience with the chips containing olestra affected the ability to predict high calories based on the sensory properties of fat. These results extend the generality of previous findings that interfering with a predictive relationship between sensory properties of foods and calories may contribute to dysregulation of energy balance, overweight and obesity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)


The article is not available unless you purchase it or have access to a library.

I am aware that the media tend to oversimplify and sensationalize things. Thanks for pointing that out.
However I think it's relevant that the rats were allowed to eat whatever/whenever they wanted, that's the whole point is that the researches found that the rats ate more of that than a control group, which should account for a lot of variation.

I don't know about anyone else, but of course, I try to not eat chips any more because they are crap. However, if I have a choice, I definitely just stick to the plain old regular fat-full ones (and eat a reasonable portion that fits within my calorie goals) rather than ones full of even more artificial chemicals, and if that's what someone takes away from this information, I think it's a valid conclusion. So:
1. don't eat processed crap.
2. if you have to eat processed crap, eat the one with the least amount of processing, fake chemicals, and artificial stuff.