Features
Gotta Run and Eat!
CBS prof studies how exercise affects body's response to fatty foods
BY DEIRDRE HEALEY
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| Prof. Lindsay Robinson hoists a glass of the fat cocktail she helped develop to enable researchers to better study the body's response to fats. With her is PhD student Mark Dekker. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
Hitting the gym before eating a high-fat meal can help relieve some of the guilt, but a U of G researcher is examining whether exercising a day in advance can also help reduce the negative effects fatty foods can have on the body.
“It's difficult to get people to cut out all high-fat meals in their diet, so we want to see if exercise might help the way the body responds to these fatty foods by looking at lipid and hormone levels in the blood,” says Prof. Lindsay Robinson, Human Health and Nutritional Sciences.
After a person ingests a high-fat meal, the lipids in the blood will typically rise and stay elevated for hours, which is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, says Robinson.
“Exercising the day before may help prevent lipid levels from skyrocketing and therefore reduce the stress that eating high-fat meals can have on the body.”
Instead of loading up on fast food, the subjects in this study will be drinking a newly designed fat cocktail made only with lipids.
“Previous studies that have tested the body's response to fat have used fast food or other fatty foods, but when you ingest a typical high-fat meal, you are also ingesting various carbohydrates and proteins that can influence the body's response,” says Robinson, who helped develop the fat cocktail.
“We wanted to develop a pure fat beverage so we could isolate the body's response to fat and have better control over the types and amount of fat being ingested.”
In an earlier study, she tested the effectiveness of the fat cocktail on males with normal lipid levels. The results, which were recently published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism, showed the drink was successful in elevating blood lipid levels over an eight-hour period after ingestion.
In the current study, she aims to discover if exercise can help alleviate the negative response in subjects with high blood lipid levels and what the mechanism might be.
The subjects, who are men between the ages of 40 and 70, will either walk on a treadmill for 60 minutes or remain sedentary the day before drinking the cocktail.
“Although it's expected that exercise will have a beneficial impact on how subjects' blood lipids respond to the fat cocktail, it's important to note that the benefits of one session of exercise won't last forever,” says Robinson. “People need to exercise regularly to maintain the favourable effects.”
Researchers are still accepting participants for the study. For information, contact Robinson's laboratory at Ext. 56967 or Mark Dekker at mdekker@uoguelph.ca.