If you’ve ever seen a friend have good results from a diet plan but then not been able to match those results yourself, you may not be surprised by new findings that show that diet response is highly individualised.
“There is an overgeneralisation of health benefits or risks tied to certain diets,” said Dr William Barrington, a researcher from North Carolina State University, who conducted this work in the laboratory of Dr. David Threadgill, at Texas A&M University.
“Our study showed that the impact of the diet is likely dependent on the genetic composition of the individual.”
The findings will be presented at The Allied Genetics Conference, a meeting hosted by the Genetics Society of America.
The new study not only has implications for people seeking the healthiest diet, but also for dietary recommendations such as the ones issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The researchers used four mouse strains to model genetic diversity. All the mice in each strain shared the same genetics, thus representing the genetics of one person. The genetic differences between any two strains were similar to that of two unrelated people.
For six months, the mice received food equivalent to today’s Western diet, a traditional Japanese diet, a traditional Mediterranean diet, or a high fat, low carb diet known as ketogenic, while some mice received standard mouse chow. They could eat as much food as they liked, but the researchers kept tabs on how much was consumed.
The researchers found that effects of each diet were strongly dependent on the strain of mice. While mice eating the Western diet generally showed negative health effects, the severity of those effects varied widely depending on the strain. In fact, one strain of mice appeared largely resistant to any negative health effects from this diet.
The Western diet and the ketogenic diet, which are both high in fat, showed opposite responses for two strains of mice. For one strain, very negative health effects on the Western diet were observed, but saw no negative health effects when this strain ate the ketogenic diet, while a different strain of mice had increased obesity and signs of metabolic syndrome on the ketogenic diet, but was much healthier on the Western diet.
“The causes for obesity were different,” said Barrington. “Some mice on specific diets simply ate more calories, and this caused them to become obese. However, mice on other diets ate less but still became obese.”
For all the mouse strains, the ketogenic diet increased calorie burn without any increase in activity level, but some strains of mice ate so much on this diet that they still became obese and experienced negative health effects.
Source: www.eurekalert.com
