Case Study: Is it ok to Binge on the Weekends?
It’s an all too familiar scene. You have been eating clean all week long, but when Friday rolls around all you can think about is that brick oven pizza. Indulging on the weekends when you eat healthy all week can’t be that bad, right? Research from the University of New South Wales in Australia tells a different story.
The study, published in the journal Molecular Nutrition and Food Research, suggests that yo-yo dieting – eating well during the week and bingeing on unhealthy food on the weekend – is just as bad for your gut health as a consistently unhealthy diet.
The human gut is made up of up to 100 trillion microbial cells that influence metabolism, nutrition, and immune function. Disrupting this system has been linked to gastrointestinal conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease and obesity.
The researchers studied how an intermittent unhealthy diet affected the gut microbiota in three groups of rats. One group was given unlimited access to an unhealthy diet; the second ate a healthy diet four days a week and an unhealthy diet three days a week, and the third group ate a healthy diet the whole time. Over the course of 16 weeks, researchers tracked body weight, fat mass, insulin levels, and leptin.
The study found eating junk food three days a week was sufficient enough to shift the gut microbiota towards the pattern seen in obese rats consuming the diet consistently. In fact, the microbiota of cycled rats was nearly indistinguishable from the rats fed a consistent diet of unhealthy food. Both of these groups’ diets were significantly different from the rats who were only fed a healthy diet.
Additionally, the cycled rats consumed 30 percent more than those that were on the healthy diet only.
It must be noted that the cycled rats were fed unhealthy food at every meal for three days of the week. Many professionals recommend the 80/20 diet. If 80 percent of your diet consists of nutritious whole foods, there is room for 20 percent of fun foods without compromising your health. So if you want to enjoy that slice of pizza or that piece of cake, go for it.