Blueberries Reduce Belly Fat – Looking for a way to reduce belly fat? Blueberries combined with a low-fat diet could be the answer.
A new study shows rats who ate a diet rich in blueberries lost abdominal fat — the kind of fat linked to heart disease and diabetes — as well as experienced other health benefits like lowered cholesterol and improved glucose control even if their diet wasn’t otherwise heart-healthy.
“Some measurements were changed by blueberry consumption even if the rats were on a high-fat diet,” researcher E. Mitchell Seymour, MS, of the University of Michigan’s Cardioprotection Research Laboratory, says in a news release.
Researchers say the results suggest that antioxidant-rich blueberries may change how the body stores and processes glucose or sugar for energy, thereby reducing the risk of both heart disease and diabetes.
“The benefits of eating fruits and vegetables have been well researched, but our findings in regard to blueberries show the naturally occurring chemicals they contain, such as anthocyanins, show promise in mitigating these health conditions,” researcher Steven Bolling, MD, of the University of Michigan, says in the release.
In the study, presented at Experimental Biology 2009, researchers fed obese rats either a high-fat or a low-fat diet enriched with either whole blueberry powder or carbohydrates as 2% of their total diet.
After 90 days, the rats fed blueberries had less abdominal fat, lower cholesterol, and improved glucose control and insulin sensitivity. The latter two factors are markers of how well the body processes sugar for energy and are related to diabetes risk.
These health benefits of blueberries were evident in rats fed both high-fat and low-fat diets enriched with the blueberry powder. But the benefits were greatest among those who ate a low-fat diet.
In addition to the other heart health benefits of blueberries, those fed the low-fat blueberry diet also lost body weight and fat mass compared to those on the high-fat diet.
Although more research is needed to confirm these results in humans, a related study presented at the same conference showed that men with risk factors for heart disease who drank wild blueberry juice for three weeks seemed to experience slight improvements in glucose and insulin control.
And that’s the latest news on blueberries reduce belly fat.
Tags: blueberries reduce belly fat, blueberries weight loss, brown fat weight loss, diet, the flat belly diet, weight loss
June 16th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Blueberries reduce belly fat? No way!
June 16th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
You have a really nice blog here. Love the blueberry article!
October 13th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Hello, good and educational article. I need to add a few mentions. If you have broad cholesterol, then you may inquire, will a low fat diet low down cholesterol? This is a serious question, because it is a good known fact that the most effective way to lower cholesterol is direct diet. Sure one component of a diet for lowering cholesterol will let in represents low in fat. Merely this is only part of the story. It is great to clear that it is the saturated fats that you want to eliminate it from the foods you feed.