Your genes play a major role in determining whether eating fried food will have an adverse effect on your weight or not, Harvard University researchers found.
Have you ever wondered why some people spend every Friday dipping their greasy knuckles into buckets of fried chicken and French fries but don't put on weight? Harvard University researchers found that genetic makeup may have a role to play in this.
A new study revealed that people who are genetically prone to obesity are significantly more likely to become obese or develop related chronic diseases from eating fried foods.
"Our findings emphasise the importance of reducing fried food consumption in the prevention of obesity, particularly in individuals genetically predisposed to adiposity," lead author Lu Qi, assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH and Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, said in a news release.
To determine how fried food consumption and genetic variants are associated with adiposity, researcher compared the risk factors in over 37,000 men and women taking part in three large US health trials. This included 9,623 women in the Nurses' Health Study, 6,379 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, and 21,426 women in the Women's Genome Health Study.
Participants were asked to complete food frequency questionnaires that asked how often they ate fried foods both at home and away from home. Researchers also evaluated participants' body mass index (BMI) and lifestyle factors, like exercise and physical activity.
Researchers found that that eating fried food more than four times a week had twice as big an effect on body mass index (BMI) for those with the highest genetic risk scores.
Qi and his team clarified that their results may have been affected by other unmeasured or unknown factors though lifestyle information, such as physical activity and smoking .
"This work provides formal proof of interaction between a combined genetic risk score and environment in obesity," said Professor Alexandra Blakemore and Dr Jessica Buxton at Imperial College London in an editorial. However, the results "are unlikely to influence public health advice, since most of us should be eating fried food more sparingly anyway."
Researchers of the study also noted that genetic information can be very valuable for treating 'monogenic' forms of obesity, caused by changes in a single gene.
Findings of this research were similar to a 2012 study conducted by Qi and his colleagues investigating the link between a person's genes and his or her consumption of sugary beverages - people who had at least one sugary drink per day were two and half times more likely to be obese when their genetic risk score was greatest.
Recently, the British Heart Foundation debunked current guidelines on the type of fat we should and shouldn't eat. Current guidelines encourage people to substitute saturated fats with unsaturated fats. However, the foundation found that there's no clear evidence that proves unsaturated fats improve heart conditions.
"This analysis of existing data suggests there isn't enough evidence to say that a diet rich in polyunsaturated fats but low in saturated fats reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease. But large scale clinical studies are needed, as these researchers recommend, before making a conclusive judgment," the foundation's Associate Medical Director, Professor Jeremy Pearson, said in a press statement.
