Though it is still important to make sure the fat is from good quality animals and cooked at lower temperatures for shorter cooking times.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – The age-old maxim “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper” may in fact be the best advice to follow to prevent metabolic syndrome, according to a new University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) study.
Metabolic syndrome is characterized by abdominal obesity, high triglycerides, insulin resistance and other cardiovascular disease-risk factors.

The study, published online March 30 in the International Journal of Obesity, examined the influence exerted by the type of foods and specific timing of intake on the development of metabolic syndrome characteristics in mice. The UAB research revealed that mice fed a meal higher in fat after waking had normal metabolic profiles. In contrast, mice that ate a more carbohydrate-rich diet in the morning and consumed a high-fat meal at the end of the day saw increased weight gain, adiposity, glucose intolerance and other markers of the metabolic syndrome.

“Studies have looked at the type and quantity of food intake, but nobody has undertaken the question of whether the timing of what you eat and when you eat it influences body weight, even though we know sleep and altered circadian rhythms influence body weight,” said the study’s lead author Molly Bray, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology in the UAB School of Public Health.

Bray said the research team found that fat intake at the time of waking seems to turn on fat metabolism very efficiently and also turns on the animal’s ability to respond to different types of food later in the day. When the animals were fed carbohydrates upon waking, carbohydrate metabolism was turned on and seemed to stay on even when the animal was eating different kinds of food later in the day.

“The first meal you have appears to program your metabolism for the rest of the day,” said study senior author Martin Young, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine in the UAB Division of Cardiovascular Disease. “This study suggests that if you ate a carbohydrate-rich breakfast it would promote carbohydrate utilization throughout the rest of the day, whereas, if you have a fat-rich breakfast, you have metabolic plasticity to transfer your energy utilization between carbohydrate and fat.”

Bray and Young said the implications of this research are important for human dietary recommendations. Humans rarely eat a uniform diet throughout the day and need the ability to respond to alterations in diet quality. Adjusting dietary composition of a given meal is an important component in energy balance, and they said their findings suggest that recommendations for weight reduction and/or maintenance should include information about the timing of dietary intake plus the quality and quantity of intake.

“Humans eat a mixed diet, and our study, which we have repeated four times in animals, seems to show that if you really want to be able to efficiently respond to mixed meals across a day then a meal in higher fat content in the morning is a good thing,” Bray said. “Another important component of our study is that, at the end of the day, the mice ate a low-caloric density meal, and we think that combination is key to the health benefits we’ve seen.”

Bray and Young said further research needs to test whether similar observations are made with different types of dietary fats and carbohydrates, and it needs to be tested in humans to see if the findings are similar between rodents and humans.
“We’re also working on a study right now to determine if these feeding regimens adversely affect heart function,” Young said.

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About the UAB School of Public Health
The UAB School of Public Health is a community of scholars and professionals working and teaching in varied arenas of public health with the goal of fostering research and best practices crucial to the health of the United States and its peoples. The school offers more than 20 areas of study and manages dozens of research and community-service centers.

About the UAB Division of Cardiovascular Disease
The UAB Division of Cardiovascular Disease emphasizes excellence in patient care, teaching plus basic and clinical research. Clinical research is closely associated with individual clinical cardiology services and encompasses a variety of opportunities and interactions with faculty associated with numerous large federal- and industry-supported clinical trials.

Assessing your percentage of body fat in proportion to muscle mass, as well as testing hydration status and cellular health markers are baseline tests that all health care practitioners should evaluate in their practice.  Testing and re-testing also helps to encourages you to stay motivated with your health programme as these assessments can show you that your programme is “working”.

Many practitioners continue to use the outdated weight scale as a measurement of “healthy” or “unhealthy” patients. In addition, health care professionals have used height versus weight scales (body mass indicators, or BMIs) for years to determine overall health. However, these are not always suitably informative because they fail to determine if someone has elevated fat or muscle mass levels.

Scales do not differentiate between muscle and fat.  Lean mass is simply your muscles, bones, connective tissue and organs. The remainder falls into the fat category. You do require a percentage of fat to function, but that consists of only a small percentage of your total body weight.

There have been studies that have indicated that college-level football/rugby players are overweight and based on that marker alone are then thought to have poor health. In reality, this is far from the truth.  If these athletes were measured in terms of body composition, we would see that they have a larger percentage of lean muscle mass to fat, which is the healthiest ratio marker.

Quite often people assume that people who are thin are healthier.  Again, this is another myth that has to be dispelled.  Your seemingly healthy weight friend may in fact be a “skinny-fat person”.  Meaning people who are thin may actually have higher fat to lean muscle mass ratio making them “fat.” Strange I know, but studies have shown that skinny is not necessarily healthy, especially if there is a high level of fat around the organs.

Starvation studies have indicated that parallel losses of lean mass and fatty tissue left subjects with the same percentage of body fat after weeks of starvation. In addition, our metabolic rates diminish as we reduce our percentage of lean mass. Our bodies require far more energy to move lean mass than to move fat. Remember, fatty tissue is an energy source and does not require energy to move. If we have a larger percentage of muscle mass, not only is it easier to move, but we also require more energy to do it. This is why exercise is so important in maintaining a healthy body type.

Measuring your body composition will give you a powerful tool to calculate your baseline general health and allow you and your health coach to set clear goals for exercise and nutrition, encouraging you to follow a programme that will not only decrease fat percentage, but increase muscle mass and health and vitality.

Contact Us on guy@successfulhealthcoach.com to arrange a FREE Consultation

It ascribes antecedence to the drop in vitamin D levels that starts with the cold ambient temperatures and food scarcity of the low-sun winter months. The need for increased metabolic activity to generate and store heat under these cold conditions could be a problem as it may deplete vital fat mass, which confers a survival advantage in such a climate by reducing surface area-to-volume ratio and by providing an energy store in the form of fat mass.

The team, based in Surrey, proposed that the body uses the natural decrease in vitamin D that occurs during winter as a signal for the accumulation of fat mass and therefore body size. Of course it makes practical sense that we get fatter in the winter and again it shows how our species that has evolved over millions of years still takes many of its cues to controlling metabolism from the environment. However, in the modern era where food is plentiful this could be contributing to the rising levels of obesity. As a guy who is known for helping clients to lose weight I think I am going to step outside right now and soak up a few rays.
In my practise I make sure that everyone I see has a 25OH Vitamin D blood test in October to assess vitamin D status moving into autumn/winter. From these results I can decide who needs vitamin D supplements and what the dose should be.

Naturopath Benjamin Brown gave a great short talk for Nutri, which is available on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVv2s0_YIlQ), indicating appropriate dosages and its well worth a watch. Vitamin D is toxic at high levels leading to hyper-calceamia in the blood, so it is important on high dosages to regularly test. I test about every 3 months. I use Iso D3 from Nutri which is cost-effective and gives a 3 month supply at a dosage of 2000IU per day.

Click here to buy Iso D3 online TODAY

Sources:

(Med Hypotheses. 2009 Mar;72(3):314-21. E pub 2008 Dec 2).

The new findings come from a Dutch research group and were reported in the July 2009 issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. In this report healthy elderly subjects were assigned to either 1.8 grams daily of fish oil, 0.4 grams daily of fish oil or 0.4 grams daily of high oleic sunflower oil (control) for 26 weeks. At base line and the end of the intervention subjects blood samples were taken and immune cells (peripheral blood mononuclear cells) were analyzed for changes in 17,699 genes. The research group found that a high fish oil intake changed the expression of 1040 genes, whereas sunflower oil intake changed the expression of only 298 genes. Specifically fish oil resulted in “a decreased expression of genes involved in inflammatory- and atherogenic-related pathways, such as nuclear transcription factor kappaB signaling, eicosanoid synthesis, scavenger receptor activity, adipogenesis, and hypoxia signaling.” Leading the authors to conclude that intake of fish oil can alter the gene expression profiles of immune cells to a more antiinflammatory and antiatherogenic status.

Guy’s Comment: Nutrigenomic discovery (how nutrition effects the reproduction of DNA) is continuously highlighting the profound impact of small dietary molecules on cellular function and the development of disease. The finding that eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) from fish oil can positively influence the expression of over a thousand genes in a single cell type, in this case human immune cells, speaks to the immense and often under appreciated role of nutrition in medicine.

This is not to mention the profound effects that fish oil has been shown to exert on the behavior of children and lengthening of attention their spans.

Click here for effective Fish Oil supplementation

Sources: Bouwens M et al. Fish-oil supplementation induces anti-inflammatory gene expression profiles in human blood mononuclear cells. Am J Clin Nutr. 2009 Jun 10.