Skipping meals will make you 'fat-bellied' instead of skinny

An Ohio State University research suggests that skipping meals sets off a series of metabolic miscues that can result in abdominal weight gain. In the study, mice that ate all of their food as a single meal and fasted the rest of the day developed insulin resistance in their livers. These mice initially were put on a restricted diet and lost weight compared to controls that had unlimited access to food. The restricted-diet mice regained weight as calories were added back into their diets and nearly caught up to controls by the study's end.

But fat around their middles which is equivalent to human belly fat weighed more in the restricted-diet mice than in mice that were free to nibble all day long. An excess of that kind of fat is associated with insulin resistance and risk for type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Martha Belury, professor of human nutrition, and his colleagues were able to tie these findings to the human tendency to skip meals because of their behaviour.

With this research, Belury and colleagues found that glucose lingered in the blood of mice that gorged and fasted- meaning the liver wasn't getting the insulin message.

Insulin resistance is also a risk for gaining abdominal fat known as white adipose tissue, which stores energy.

Belury said, even though the gorging and fasting mice had about the same body weights as control mice, their adipose depots were heavier. If you're pumping out more sugar into the blood, adipose is happy to pick up glucose and store it which makes a happy fat cell - but that is not what they wanted, they wanted to shrink these cells to reduce fat tissue.

The research is published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry.