Putting on just 6lb at Xmas can harm your health

MOST of us put on a few pounds at Christmas – but we might be a bit less greedy if we knew the drastic effect it can have on our health.

Adding just 6lb affected the heart and immune system and boosted harmful bacteria living in the gut, researchers found.

Professor Michael Snyder, from Stanford University in California, said: ‘The goal was to characterise what happens during weight gain and loss at a level that no one has ever done before. In the end, we literally made billions of measurements.

‘There were a huge number of changes, just with the kind of weight you might gain over the holidays.’

The team found that the human body changed in dramatic fashion at the molecular level – with changes in bacteria populations, a rise in inflammation, and molecular changes associated with heart disease.

The study, published in the journal Cell Systems, was based on 23 volunteers who were put on a high- calorie diet. After 30 days they had added 6lb on average.

In particular, scientists noticed changes to gene behaviour that have been associated with an increased risk of heart failure. Professor Snyder said: ‘That was quite surprising. I didn’t expect 30 days of overeating to change the whole heart pathway. But this fits with how we think of the human body. It’s a whole system, not a few isolated components, so there are system-wide changes when people gain weight.’

Happily, most of the damage was undone when the extra weight was shed. After participants lost the weight, most things bounced back to normal levels. However, some changes to protein production associated with the weight gain persisted.