Recent results from a study by UC Irvine pharmacologists showed that eating "fatty foods" curbed hunger.
Not your "normal" fatty foods of the junk food variety, but those rich in unsaturated fats such as avocados, nuts and olive oil (actually mono-unsaturated fatty acids MUFA) "have been found to play a pivotal role in sending a message to the brain that a person is full and to stop eating".
How's it work?
- The researchers studied how a fat-derived compound (called oleoylethanolamide - OEA) regulates hunger and body weight.
- They found that an unsaturated fatty acid called oleic acid stimulates production of OEA, which in turn decreases appetite.
- Oleic acid is transformed into OEA by cells in the upper region of the small intestine.
- OEA then finds its way to nerve endings that carry the hunger-curbing message to the brain.
- There, it activates a brain circuit that increases feelings of fullness, researchers said.
In previous studies, researchers said they found that increasing OEA levels can reduce appetite, produce weight loss and lower blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels.
That's all fantastic news for adult diabetics as improving all three of those factors seriously reduces our overall risk profile, and they are what we have to achieve as the basic goals when first setting out to control our diabetes.
How can this finding be used practically, by combining it with the MUFA foods such as avocado and also nuts for example which we've posted about many times. It makes me feel good about my long-standing practice of eating a half-avocado each morning, which I always felt had had a positive effect on my blood cholesterol and triglyceride readings. (Protein plays in important role in limiting hunger as well, but by different means.)
Sorry, back to you - if you are setting out to lose weight as part of your diabetic management program, and let's say a 10% reduction in body weight, then start to introduce more MUFA foods - replacing other foods and hopefully those you take out have more calories - and this should start to make you feel full more easily.
Also, after exercise eat these MUFA foods as otherwise the exercise can stimulate your appetite and it doesn't take much to eat back on the calories you're just burnt off.
Just a note about the "correct" fatty foods - please don't mistake this feeling of fullness with being similar to the feeling from gorging on fast foods as diets high in processed foods that are riddled with saturated fats might throw a wrench into this system of metabolic control, the researchers said. What they are saying is that the fat in fatty fast foods actually stops the message to the brain and you keep eating until you are physically full - perhaps at that stage it is a message from the poor overstretched stomach?
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