Washington: Just five days of eating a high-fat diet can alter how your body's muscles process food, which could lead to long-term problems such as weight gain, obesity, and other health issues, a new study has found.
"Most people think they can indulge in high-fat foods for a few days and get away with it," said Matt Hulver, an associate professor of human nutrition, foods, and exercise in the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
"But all it takes is five days for your body's muscle to start to protest," Hulver said.
Researchers found that the manner in which muscle metabolises nutrients is changed in just five days of high-fat feeding.
"This shows that our bodies can respond dramatically to changes in diet in a shorter time frame than we have previously thought," said Hulver.
"If you think about it, five days is a very short time. There are plenty of times when we all eat fatty foods for a few days, be it the holidays, vacations, or other celebrations.
"But this research shows that those high-fat diets can change a person's normal metabolism in a very short timeframe," Hulver said.
Hulver and his colleagues found that muscles' ability to oxidise glucose after a meal is disrupted after five days of eating a high-fat diet, which could lead to the body's inability to respond to insulin, a risk factor for the development of diabetes and other diseases.
To conduct the study, healthy college-age students were fed a fat-laden diet that included sausage biscuits, macaroni and cheese, and food loaded with butter to increase the percentage of their daily fat intake.
A normal diet is made up of about 30 per cent fat and students in this study had diets that were about 55 per cent fat. Their overall caloric intake remained the same as it was prior to the high fat diet.
Muscle samples were then collected to see how it metabolised glucose. Although the study showed the manner in which the muscle metabolised glucose was altered, the students did not gain weight or have any signs of insulin resistance.
Hulver and the team are now interested in examining how these short-term changes in the muscle can adversely affect the body in the long run and how quickly these deleterious changes in the muscle can be reversed once someone returns to a low-fat diet.
The study was published in the journal Obesity.
