Two out of three adults with obesity have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which boosts the risk of type 2 diabetes. Scientists randomly assigned 80 adults with NAFLD to alternate-day fasting (eating only 600 calories on their fast days), aerobic exercise (five one-hour sessions per week), both, or no intervention (control).
“Although avocados are high in fat, it’s mainly healthy monounsaturated fat,” says WebMD. “Research has found that this type of fat in your diet can help trim your waistline.” Or...maybe not.
Does fast food lead to unhealthy visceral belly fat? Researchers tracked 3,156 young adults for 25 years. The more often they ate at fast food restaurants, the higher their visceral (deep belly) fat, whether or not they had obesity. And those who ate fast food at least three times a week had roughly five times the risk of metabolic-associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD) compared to those who ate fast food no more than once a month.
There’s no good evidence that low-carb diets are a magic bullet for weight loss. But many people eat too many refined carbs, not just from sweets but from oversized servings of pasta, pizza, burritos, burgers, and sandwiches made with white flour, along with the chips or fries that are served on the side.
With 70 percent of American adults and 33 percent of children now classified as overweight or obese, the obesity epidemic is not exactly a secret. Yet some recent findings about the causes and consequences of weight gain may surprise you.
Are some fats in foods more likely to end up as harmful visceral fat than as less-harmful subcutaneous fat?
To find out, Ulf Risérus, associate professor of clinical nutrition and metabolism at Uppsala University in Sweden, and his colleagues devised what some have called “the muffin study.”
“We had lean people eat, on average, three muffins per day on top of their usual diet,” he explains. That meant that each participant ate 750 more calories a day than he or she needed.
“We wanted a moderate—not an extreme—increase in calorie intake to represent the normal situation in the Western world, where most people gain weight after their 30s.”
