Why do diets not always give results?
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
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Compliance with the diet in order to lose weight, for many becomes the meaning of existence. Choosing a new diet, we always wait for the maximum result - but what do we get in reality? According to statistics, most of the dietary approaches are "fail".
Why is this happening? Why is the diet often not only does not show the proper effect, but can add a couple of kilograms?
A new experiment of scientists helped explain why our bodies are resisting diets, and why changes in diet do not always lead to weight loss.
The popular periodical "eLife" informs: the scheme of loss of sensitivity of an organism to changes in a food is available not only at people, but also at animals. Specialists from Cambridge conducted experiments on rodents - the results obtained were really amazing.
As Professor Clemens Blowe points out, many people suffer from the failure of diets due to the special storage of nerve cells of the hypothalamus - a unique brain department that corrects the metabolic processes inside the body. The hypothalamus function also consists in the synthesis of hormones and the regulation of the basic physiological processes - it is thermoregulation, sexual desire, sleep and the human need for food.
The hypothalamus contains a number of specific neuropeptides that participate in the regulation of appetite. If the sounded nerve cells "work", then the person experiences a feeling of hunger. If neurons "sleep" - there is no appetite. Such a scheme is applicable, both to man and to animals.
Scientists, thanks to knowledge in genetic engineering, were able to turn off and turn on the neurons of the hypothalamus in mice, after which they observed and made certain conclusions. The animals were implanted with temperature sensors, energy meters and other devices.
It was found that during a nutritional deficiency, neurons are activated, which leads to the fact that the body adapts and performs the usual work for it, but with less energy.
To put it another way, if you severely restrict the diet, it pushes the body to save energy, which, in turn, minimizes the effect of losing weight.
When scientists removed the dietary restrictions, the energy costs of the animals increased again.
Thus, experts made an important conclusion: turning off the neurons of the hypothalamus for only a couple of days leads to the activation of metabolic processes, which contributes to the loss of excess kilograms.
Professor Blue comments this conclusion as follows: "We managed to confirm that a number of nerve cells control the appetite and energy costs of the body. Given the supply of sufficient amounts of food in the body, these cells force a person to take this food, but if the food is small, they "include" the economy and inhibit the process of burning fat. "
One of the leaders of the experiment, Luc Bark, expressed confidence that this discovery will be useful for developing a new method of combating obesity. If you disable the necessary nerve structures, you can change the settings of metabolic processes, aiming them at losing weight.