Boost Weight Loss By Limiting Fructose

DALLAS – July 24, 2008 – One of the reasons people on low-carbohydrate diets may lose weight is that they reduce their intake of fructose, a type of sugar that can be made into body fat quickly, according to a researcher at UT Southwestern Medical Center.

Dr. Elizabeth Parks, associate professor of clinical nutrition and lead author of a study appearing in a current issue of the Journal of Nutrition, said her team's findings suggest that the right type of carbohydrates a person eats may be just as important in weight control as the number of calories a person eats.

Current health guidelines suggest that limiting processed carbohydrates, many of which contain high-fructose corn syrup, may help prevent weight gain, and the new data on fructose clearly support this recommendation.

"Our study shows for the first time the surprising speed with which humans make body fat from fructose," Dr. Parks said. Fructose, glucose and sucrose, which is a mixture of fructose and glucose, are all forms of sugar but are metabolized differently.

"All three can be made into triglycerides, a form of body fat; however, once you start the process of fat synthesis from fructose, it's hard to slow it down," she said.

In humans, triglycerides are predominantly formed in the liver, which acts like a traffic cop to coordinate the use of dietary sugars. It is the liver's job, when it encounters glucose, to decide whether the body needs to store the glucose as glycogen, burn it for energy or turn the glucose into triglycerides. When there's a lot of glucose to process, it is put aside to process later.

Fructose, on the other hand, enters this metabolic pathway downstream, bypassing the traffic cop and flooding the metabolic pathway.

"It's basically sneaking into the rock concert through the fence," Dr. Parks said. "It's a less-controlled movement of fructose through these pathways that causes it to contribute to greater triglyceride synthesis. The bottom line of this study is that fructose very quickly gets made into fat in the body."

Though fructose, a monosaccharide, or simple sugar, is naturally found in high levels in fruit, it is also added to many processed foods. Fructose is perhaps best known for its presence in the sweetener called high-fructose corn syrup or HFCS, which is typically 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose, similar to the mix that can be found in fruits. It has become the preferred sweetener for many food manufacturers because it is generally cheaper, sweeter and easier to blend into beverages than table sugar.

For the study, six healthy individuals performed three different tests in which they had to consume a fruit drink formulation. In one test, the breakfast drink was 100 percent glucose, similar to the liquid doctors give patients to test for diabetes – the oral glucose tolerance test. In the second test, they drank half glucose and half fructose, and in the third, they drank 25 percent glucose and 75 percent fructose. The tests were random and blinded, and the subjects ate a regular lunch about four hours later.

The researchers found that lipogenesis, the process by which sugars are turned into body fat, increased significantly when as little as half the glucose was replaced with fructose. Fructose given at breakfast also changed the way the body handled the food eaten at lunch. After fructose consumption, the liver increased the storage of lunch fats that might have been used for other purposes.

"The message from this study is powerful because body fat synthesis was measured immediately after the sweet drinks were consumed," Dr. Parks said. "The carbohydrates came into the body as sugars, the liver took the molecules apart like tinker toys, and put them back together to build fats. All this happened within four hours after the fructose drink. As a result, when the next meal was eaten, the lunch fat was more likely to be stored than burned.

"This is an underestimate of the effect of fructose because these individuals consumed the drinks while fasting and because the subjects were healthy, lean and could presumably process the fructose pretty quickly. Fat synthesis from sugars may be worse in people who are overweight or obese because this process may be already revved up."

Dr. Parks said that people trying to lose weight shouldn't eliminate fruit from their diets but that limiting processed foods containing the sugar may help.

"There are lots of people out there who want to demonize fructose as the cause of the obesity epidemic," she said. "I think it may be a contributor, but it's not the only problem. Americans are eating too many calories for their activity level. We're overeating fat, we're overeating protein; and we're overeating all sugars."

Contact: Kristen Holland Shear
kristen.hollandshear@utsouthwestern.edu
214-648-3404
UT Southwestern Medical Center

Tags: Weight Control, weight loss, fructose in body weight, clinical nutrition, fat synthesis from fructose, fat synthesis, glycogen, lipogenesis

Employer-Based Weight Loss Programs Are Helpful

CINCINNATI—A new review of studies from UC shows that a little shove from the workplace may actually be the ticket to dropping weight.

According to Michael Benedict, MD, and colleagues at UC, employer-based programs for weight loss are modestly effective at helping workers take off extra pounds.

“Worksite-based programs do tend to result in weight loss for the people that participate in them,” says Benedict, co-author of the study and researcher in the department of internal medicine.

The review appears in the July-August issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion.

Benedict and colleagues looked at 11 studies published since 1994 to determine their results.

Most of the programs involved education and counseling designed to improve diet and increase physical activity and lasted anywhere from two to 18 months. Forty-six percent of the studies involved low-intensity interventions, 18 percent were moderate intensity and 36 percent were high intensity.

Benedict says that intensity may be an important factor when it comes to weight loss. He added that programs incorporating face-to-face contact with subjects more than once a month appeared to be more effective than other programs.

In comparison, participants in higher intensity programs lost an average of 2.2 pounds to almost 14 pounds, while non-participants ranged from a loss of 1.5 pounds to a gain of 1.1 pounds.

“Most employed adults in the U.S. spend nearly half of their waking hours at their place of employment,” Benedict says. “Worksite based programs have great potential to positively impact our current obesity epidemic.

However, Benedict says it was difficult to draw conclusions about weight-loss maintenance.

“Participants in these programs may lose weight, but it is unclear what happens after the fact, as weight maintenance has not been studied,” he says.

There is also minimal data to show how much money employers could save if they start worksite weight-loss programs. Benedict says many employers want to know that implementing these programs will lead to a positive return on investment.

Studies have shown that other worksite health interventions targeting high risk employees, like smokers and people with hypertension, may benefit employers financially within only a few years.

“These programs have the potential to have a tremendous public health impact,” he says. “However, more high quality research is needed.”

Michael Benedict, MD,

Media Contact: Katie Pence, (513) 558-4561

Tags: weight loss, Weight Control, American Journal of Health Promotion

Weight Loss Through Big Breakfast Diat, Is It For You?

Researchers have found a possible way to overcome the common problem of dieters eventually abandoning their diet and regaining the weight they lost. Eat a big breakfast packed with carbohydrates ("carbs") and protein, then follow a low-carb, low-calorie diet the rest of the day, the authors of a new study recommend. Results were presented Tuesday, June 17, at The Endocrine Society's 90th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

"Most weight loss studies have determined that a very low carbohydrate diet is not a good method to reduce weight," said lead author Daniela Jakubowicz, MD, of the Hospital de Clinicas, Caracas, Venzezuela. "It exacerbates the craving for carbohydrates and slows metabolism. As a result, after a short period of weight loss, there is a quick return to obesity."

Only five percent of carbohydrate-restrictive diets are successful after two years, Jakubowicz said. Most carbohydrate-restrictive diets, she said, do not address addictive eating impulses.

With scientists from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Jakubowicz and her colleagues conducted a study, which they said shows that a diet's long-term effectiveness depends on its ability to increase a sense of fullness and bring down carb cravings. They compared their new diet with a strict low-carb diet in 94 obese, physically inactive women. Both diets were low in fat and total calories but differed in the carbohydrate distribution.

Forty-six women were on the very-low-carb diet, which allowed them to eat 1,085 calories a day. The diet consisted of 17 grams of carbohydrates, 51 grams of protein and 78 grams of fat a day. The smallest meal was breakfast, at 290 calories. For breakfast the dieters were permitted only 7 grams of carbohydrates, such as bread, fruit, cereal and milk. Dieters could eat just 12 grams of protein, such as meat and eggs, in the morning.

On the modified low-carb diet, or "big-breakfast diet," the other 48 dieters ate 1,240 calories a day. Although lower in total fat (46 grams) than the other diet, the new diet had higher daily allotments of carbs (97 grams) and protein (93 grams). Dieters ate a 610-calorie big breakfast, consisting of 58 grams of carbs, 47 grams of protein and 22 fat grams. The diet schedule for lunch was 395 calories (34, 28 and 13 grams of carbs, protein and fat, respectively); dinner was 235 calories (5, 18 and 26 grams, respectively).

The first half of the eight-month study focused on weight loss, and the last four months on weight maintenance. At four months, the women on the strict low-carb diet dropped an average of about 28 pounds, and the women on the big-breakfast diet lost nearly 23 pounds on average, which according to Jakubowicz was not significantly different. But at 8 months, the low-carb dieters regained an average of 18 pounds, while the big-breakfast group continued to lose weight, shedding another 16.5 pounds. Those on the new diet lost more than 21 percent of their body weight, compared with just 4.5 percent for the low-carb group. Furthermore, the study found that women who ate a big breakfast reported feeling less hungry, especially before lunch, and having fewer cravings for carbs than the other women did.

Jakubowicz said the big-breakfast diet works because it controls appetite and cravings for sweets and starches. It also is healthier than an extremely low-carbohydrate diet, according to Jakubowicz, because it allows people to eat more fruit and therefore get enough fiber and vitamins. She said she has successfully used the diet in her patients for more than 15 years.

Tags: Weight Control, weight loss, big-breakfast diet, Daniela Jakubowicz

VBLOC Weight-loss Therapy, A Clinical Research Study By Stanford

Stanford researchers are conducting a national study to test a new weight-loss therapy,VBLOC that interfere with the nerves that tell people when they're hungry and in control how the body stores fat.Carrying extra weight is a real cause for concern. Overweight and obesity are risk factors for a number of diseases, including Type 2 diabetes (diabetes mellitus), high cholesterol, hypertension, osteoarthritis, obesity-related cardiomyopathy and perhaps even some forms of cancer (breast, colorectal, endometrial and kidney).

Although successful, long-term weight loss still requires a commitment to modifying lifestyle behaviors, there may be more you can do to empower healthy weight loss.

Unlike other types of bariatric surgery (laparoscopic banding or gastric bypass,) that alter the stomach’s anatomy, VBLOC Therapy is delivered by an implantable, investigational device intended to block signals carried on the vagus nerve between the brain and the digestive system that control sensations of hunger, satisfaction and fullness.

The device itself uses laparoscopically-implanted electrodes that deliver high-frequency, low-energy electrical impulses to block the signals conveyed through the vagal nerves. By being able to reversibly control these signals, VBLOC Therapy may aid in weight loss.

VBLOC Therapy includes both external and implanted components. VBLOC Therapy may be turned off and is designed to be reversible, programmable and non-invasively adjustable.

The EMPOWER clinical research study is now enrolling patients to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of the investigational device that delivers VBLOC Therapy.

Who Is a Candidate for Clinical Trials of VBLOC Therapy?

Individuals may be considered for participation in Clinical Trials of VBLOC Therapy if they:

• Have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 40 to 45, or of 35 or greater and also suffer from at least one obesity related condition or co-morbidity such as diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol or sleep apnea.
• Have completed at least six months of a supervised weight loss program and have failed to lose weight or to maintain weight loss.

For more information about VBLOC Therapy and the EMPOWER clinical research study, please call the nurse-staffed information line at 1-866-291-9146 Monday–Thursday, 7 a.m.–7 p.m. and Friday, 7 a.m.–6 p.m., CST.

CAUTION: Investigational device. Limited by Federal law to investigational use.

tag: Weight-loss, Weight Control, VBLOC Therapy, EMPOWER clinical research study, Body Mass Index, laparoscopic banding, gastric bypass, bariatric surgery

Leftbefores! Weight Control With A Little Help From Portion Control

When ever we visit restaurants, they almost always serve more food than one person needs but can eat, at one meal.
So we go ahead and gulp the food down since we already know we are going to pay for it. Then we complain about how full we are!. So what should we do?
For starters we split an entrée between two if WE happen to be at a lunch or dinner table in a restaurant. So it is all good and everyone is eating correctly. What if I am alone at the restaurant? Well it is easy to ask for a "to-go" box. But this time do it before the end of the meal! as soon as your lunch or dinner brought to the table, wrap up half your meal in the to-go box or bag. Take the leftbefores home, refrigerate and enjoy another meal or a snack tomorrow.

This is the first entry in a new series, baby steps in weight control, that you can use to fight the weight problems in small steps. Come back for more simple weight control steps.

tag: Portion Control, Weight Control, leftovers, leftbefores, baby steps in weight control,