Calories Still Count During the Weekends: Study says Binge-eating Junk Food is as Bad as Eating it All Week Long

If you think that having "cheat days" or if you believe that calories don't count on the weekends, you might probably reconsider your dieting battle plan.

A new study published on the the Molecular Nutrition and Food Research Journal has found out that binge-eating junk food or sticking to eating healthy the whole week just to have an excuse to eating crap on the weekends can have effects similar to a consistent crappy-food eating diet.

Results collected from data through experimentation using mice injected with tummy cells from obese people, this "yo-yo" dieting can affect the stomach's organisms (microbiota).

An adult's stomach is estimated to contain 100 trillion microbiota which can influence the metabolism, immune system and overall nutrition including mental health.

Test results also suggest that if these micro cells are disrupted, it can lead to conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease and obesity. Mice that were lean before the experiment became obese as well.

The scientists divided the lab mice in to three groups, where in each group was given a healthy diet, one with a junk food diet, while the other was provide with the mixture of two-a healthy diet for four days and a junk food diet for three days. The experiment was run over a span of 16 weeks.

Results show that the group of mice that had recurring diets used up three times as much energy, compared to the group who solely eat healthy food. When the third group of mice returned to eating healthy, they ended up eating half as much nutritious food than those who ate healthy consistently.

By the end of the experiment, the rats on the cyclical diet were 18% heavier than the group of rats that ate healthy all through out 16 weeks, but still lighter than the group who ate junk food the whole time.

Considering the microbiota movement, the rats on the junk food diet and the group of mice with the cyclical diet had their microbiota profile shilfted.

People who are consuming junk food all the time and those who swear that they only eat non-healthy stuff during the weekends can suffer similar, negative changes to their stomach cells balance that could manifest the same thing. Binge eating at the weekend having a similar effect to eating junk food all the time.

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