Red meat makes you eat more, study says

Eating too much steak can be a serious health risk, though, not in the way that we think.

Researchers from the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center discovered that high iron intake (i.e. eating a lot of red meat) suppresses an appetite-controlling hormone called leptin. Less leptin increases your appetite and leads to overeating (i.e. more red meat).

The study was done on male mice which were fed normal (35 mg/kg) and high (2000 mg/kg) iron diets for two months. Leptin levels were 42% lower in the high-iron-diet mice.

“We showed that the amount of food intake increased in animals that had high levels of dietary iron,” said Don McClain, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center on Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism at Wake Forest Baptist and senior author of the study. “In people, high iron, even in the high-normal range, has been implicated as a contributing factor to many diseases, including diabetes, fatty liver disease and Alzheimer’s, so this is yet another reason not to eat so much red meat because the iron in red meat is more readily absorbed than iron from plants.”

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Category: Education, Features