Adding yogurt to your diet can turn to your body's fat burning motors, speed weight loss and trim your belly, according to a new study.
The researchers found that obese adults who ate three portions of fat-free yogurt per day as part of a reduced calorie diet lost 22% more weight and 61% more body fat than those who simply Cut calories and not bone in calcium. Yogurt eaters have also lost 81% more fat in the stomach area than non-yogurt eaters.
"Not only the yogurt helped study participants to lose more weight - the average weight loss was 14 pounds - they were twice as effective in maintaining lean muscle mass," says researcher Michael says Zemel, PhD, Nutrition Professor at the University of Tennessee, in a news version. "This is a critical issue when dieting - you want to lose fat, no muscle. The muscle helps burn calories, but it is often compromised during weight loss."
The results appear in the April issue of the International Journal of Obesity.
How To Create Caloric Deficit For Fat Loss - Yogurt May Help Burn Fat, Promote Weight Loss
In the study, the researchers compared the effects of adding yogurt to a reduced calorie diet in weight loss in 34 healthy obese adults that were divided into two groups.
For 12 weeks, the first group ate three portions of 6 ounces of fat-free yogurt, providing about 1,100 milligrams of calcium per day; The other group ate only a portion of dairy products that provide 400-500 milligrams of calcium per day. Both groups ate a controlled diet that contained 500 less calories than normal to stimulate weight loss.
As expected, all participants lost weight as a result of the caloric constraint. But the study showed that both weight loss and fat were significantly higher in the yogurt group.
For example, those in the low calcium diet lost an average of 11 pounds, but those in the high calcium yogurt diet lost an average of more than 14 pounds.
Yogurt diet participants have also lost 81% more fat in the stomach area, which is the most dangerous type of fat. Excess fat in the middle of the part has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke and some forms of cancer.
In an editorial that accompanies the study, Ruth Harris, Associate Food and Nutrition Professor at the University of Georgia, says study results are impressive and provide additional evidence for calcium and milk protein playing a role in determining the body weight and fat.
But it says that the researchers still have to identify the scientific reasoning behind these effects of proposed fat burning.
"The possibility The increase in dietary calcium levels can reduce body weight or overwhelming weight loss is to attract an increasing amount of attention," Harris writes. "For many in the scientific community, however, it is difficult to embrace the effectiveness of dietary calcium and dairy protein without a good understanding of mechanisms responsible for loss of body fat."
The study was supported by the Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition, General Mills Inc., which makes Yoplait.
