Losing Christmas weight ‘may not undo all the damage to your health’
For many of us, it’s part of an annual cycle: we pig out on fatty food and booze at Christmas, pile on weight, then diet in January.
But simply losing the weight after gorging on all those pigs in blankets and slices of turkey might not be enough to undo the damage to your health, scientists have warned.
Researchers from Stanford University monitored gene function, bacteria, metabolism and the cardiovascular system in people as they gained weight.
Dr Michael Snyder, PhD, professor of genetics at Stanford School of Medicine saidThe goal here was to characterise what happens during weight gain and loss at a level that no one has ever done before.’
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‘There were a huge number of changes, just with the kind of weight you might gain over the holidays that just occurred.’
The researchers say that the dramatic changes that the body undergoes during weight gain may not all be undone by weight loss.
Weight gain causes inflammation, boosts numbers of harmful bacteria living in the gut, and causes a shift in gene activity associated with heart failure.
Dr Michael Snyder, PhD, professor of genetics at Stanford School of Medicine said, ‘That was quite surprising. I didn’t expect 30 days of overeating to change the whole heart pathway.
‘But this all fits with how we think of the human body – it’s a whole system, not just a few isolated components, so there are system-wide changes when people gain weight.
‘In the end, we literally made billions of measurements.’
Snyder says that most of the changes – such as bacterial changes in the gut – are reversible, but his team noticed changes to protein production in the body which did persist.
