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Newscripts

Eating season draws to a close, Battling the bulge, Banishing fat, No-diet diet

January 30, 2006 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 84, Issue 5

Eating season draws to a close

Nearly two-thirds of adults in the U.S. are officially overweight by government standards. That's not a secret. The reasons of course are that most people eat more than they need, don't exercise enough, and carry on with other sorts of unhealthy behavior. Fortunately, eating season is just about over this year. For those in the know, that's the period stretching more or less from Halloween to Valentine's Day, which includes Thanksgiving, Christmas and Hanukkah, New Year's, and Super Bowl Sunday. To celebrate the end of eating season, Newscripts takes a look at diet-related findings that are hopeful, if not promising.

Battling the bulge

Most people don't seem to have a problem initially losing weight when going on a diet, but it's estimated that 85% of people who have significant planned weight loss end up gaining it all back. Columbia University researchers now claim to be able to explain this conundrum.

Michael Rosenbaum and his colleagues reported in the Dec. 1, 2005, issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation that your body doesn't like it when you lose weight, and hormones kick in to lead you back to the status quo. The principal culprit is leptin, aka the antiobesity hormone.

A decade ago, leptin was hailed as a possible magic bullet for weight-loss therapy, but it hasn't lived up to its billing yet. Leptin is produced in fat cells, and one of its roles is to signal the brain that the body has enough or too little fat. Rosenbaum and company suggest that the body interprets extended weight loss as a leptin deficiency and is driven to compensate by regaining weight. They figure that if leptin levels are maintained on an even keel during weight loss, then the body will adjust, and a motivated weight-watcher can keep the extra pounds at bay.

To test their hypothesis, the Columbia researchers administered replacement amounts of leptin to people who lost weight on a controlled diet. They found that concentrations of several hormones and other physiological benchmarks returned to pre-weight-loss levels even as the test subjects maintained their new figures. Rosenbaum and his coworkers plan to target the leptin-signaling pathway to see if they can develop a therapeutic solution to sustainable weight loss.

Banishing fat

Low-fat fried chicken may seem like a pipe dream, but one dreamer is food chemist Stephen D. Kelleher of Proteus Industries, Gloucester, Mass. Kelleher has developed a process to bathe precooked breaded chicken or fish with a protein solution. The proteins form a thin film on the breading, which functions as a fat shield when the food is cooked and reduces the amount of oil that is absorbed. Kelleher's approach was made possible by a method he devised to efficiently extract proteins from various meats.

Breaded chicken treated with the protein solution ends up with up to 50% less fat than typical fried chicken, while breaded fish treated with the solution has about 70% less fat. Proteus is partnering with food companies to begin production with the process. One of the first products will be fish sticks made by Good Harbor Fillet, also located in Gloucester, which calls itself "America's oldest fishing port," established in 1623.

No-diet diet

Steven R. Hawks is a Brigham Young University (BYU) health science professor who lost 50 lb and has kept it off for more than five years. He says he has been able to maintain a healthy weight not by restricting his diet but by moderating his food intake. He calls his plan "intuitive eating," and along with exercise, it naturally tends to be a quite healthy approach to living, he notes.

Hawks claims that he eats basically anything he wants, even fast food and as many chocolates as he desires. The catch, he says, is that you consistently eat only when you are hungry and stop when you are full. No matter what, when, where, or how.

In a published study of a small group of BYU students, he reports that intuitive eaters typically weigh less and have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than other people. Hawks has started the National Institute of Intuitive Eating to promote his approach.

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This week's column was written by Steve Ritter. Please send comments and suggestions to newscripts@acs.org.

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