Sweet! Sugar that’s good for you
WHEN we look at sugar, it’s normally the harmful impacts it can have on your body, but new research, published in the journal Cell Reports, has discovered that not all sugars might actually be that bad for the waistline.
Mannose is a type of sugar found naturally in fruits like cranberries – and it might help shift belly fat.
Professor Hudson Freeze, director of the Human Genetics Program at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in San Diego, and his team discovered that mice who were fed a high-fat diet plus mannose were leaner, had less fat in their livers, had higher levels of fitness and were more tolerant to glucose than the mice on a high-fat diet without mannose.
Analyses of gut bacteria also found that mice that consumed mannose processed carbohydrates less efficiently than those that did not, and they also had “higher fecal energy content”. This suggests that they absorbed fewer calories than mannose-free rodents.
Interestingly, when the scientist then took mannose out of the mice’s high-fat diet and re-examined them, the mice had regained weight and their bacterial composition went back to resemble that of obese rodents.
While this study is only in rodents, researchers believe it could help lead to new treatments for both weight gain and obesity.
“These findings further confirm the important role of the gut microbiome in metabolism,” Prof Freeze said.
“But how exactly it affects the body’s metabolism remains a mystery.”