Effective Diet Has No Magic Pill
Exercise or diet for the New Year?
Diet. How's that for a four-letter word, especially this time of
year? The jolly season has been packed away with the tinsel and
party hats. Suddenly, 'tis the season to lose a few pounds.
Low carb? Low fat? No flour? No sugar? What's a body to do?
We turned to WSU's own informal "Food Intake and Obesity Group"
in the Department of Veterinary, Comparative Anatomy, Physiology
and Pharmacology for answers.
Well, they said, it isn't easy. And ultimately, the best answer
right now is an eight-letter word: exercise.
Okay, you didn't need a Ph.D. to figure that out. But, you probably
do need a Ph.D., and years of research, to begin to figure out why
dieting to lose weight is so difficult.
From an evolutionary perspective, gaining weight during times of plenty would have been not only beneficial, but perhaps critical. While we in the 21st century have certain ideas about what is or isn't a healthy weight, perhaps our stomach and brain are still operating according to controls that made sense for tens of thousands of years previously. Easy access to tasty food was rarely a problem; too little food of any kind was.
"There's a lot of redundancy in the systems that maintain body
weight," said VCAPP professor Steve Simasko. Michael Wiater, a
research and teaching assistant, put it another, more ominous, way:
"The prospects for overriding the biological controls are not good,
and it's important to understand there will be consequences for
dieters, such as chronic hunger, which can be painful."
Simasko and Wiater, along with Sue Ritter, Gil Burns, and Bob
Ritter, study various aspects of the gastrointestinal tract and
enteric nervous system. At the cellular, and even molecular, level,
they are trying to figure out how the gastrointestinal tract sends
signals to the brain, what those signals are, and how those signals
affect us when we feel hungry, what we decide to eat and when we
decide to stop eating. It's a complicated process.