Food Calories Is What Counts at the End of the Day
You may be selective with the foods you eat, and that’s great. But the main area you want to pay attention to when placing food on your plate is the portion of the food. Why? Because food calorie intake is the main cause of your gaining or losing weight.
You may decrease or increase the amount of protein in your meals hoping your metabolism will burn more calories; nothing wrong with that. But if your daily calories are substantially greater than the daily calories you need to take, you will gain weight regardless what the composition of your meal is.
That is what George Bray, MD, of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., and colleagues reported in the Jan. 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study, published by MedPage Today on January 03, 2012 and shown below, indicates that eating too much is what really counts at the end of the day, regardless of how much or how little protein you eat.
Calories, Not Protein, Count in Fat Gain
Eating too much guarantees that your body will pack on the fat, regardless of how much protein you consume, researchers found.
Patients who ate a low-protein diet gained less weight overall than those who ate a normal- or high-protein diet, but they all experienced a similar increase in fat mass when they overate by about 1,000 calories a day, George Bray, MD, of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., and colleagues reported in the Jan. 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“Fat storage was exactly the same with all three levels of protein,” Bray told The JAMA Report. “Protein, on the other hand, had no effect on storage of fat, but it did affect weight gain.”
Some work has suggested that eating a diet high or low in protein could maintain body weight through its potential effects on metabolism; eating too little could spare lean body mass while eating too much could add lean body mass. Activate MedPage Today’s CME feature and receive free CME credit on medical stories like this oneAction Points.
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