Even short periods of bingeing on junk food can leave the body more prone to gain weight for years to come, a study has found.
While there has been a lot of research into how weight tends to creep up with age, this study is one of the first to deliberately overfeed its subjects with junk food — foods high in fat and sugar — and then track their progress. Swedish researchers weighed and measured 18 slim, healthy and active men and women who were asked to almost double their calorie intake for a month.
The volunteers, in their early twenties, ate at least two junk-food meals a day and did very little exercise. Those in a second group were told to go about their lives as normal. The first group gained an average of a stone over the month. Six months later, they had lost most but not all of this weight. But two and a half years later the binge eaters were about three kilograms heavier than at the start of the experiment but the others had not put on any weight, the journal Nutrition & Metabolism reports.
Much of the extra fat was stored on the hips, giving credence to the saying, a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.
