Are you craving chips or chocolate, and if you go for a run instead? According to a recent study published on April 6 in the journal Obesitypractice a sports activity regular intense would control cravings and his cravings for high-fat foods. The researchers assure that exercise can strengthen its ability to control itself in the face of the envy of certain people. fatty foods. According to the study carried out on rats by American researchers at the University of Washington, doing high-intensity sports helps to reduce our attraction to these high-fat foods.
Sport reduces appetite for fatty foods
To reach these conclusions, the scientists put rats on a 30-day diet and found that those who made intensive exercise had resisted cues to consume high-fat pelleted food. In practice, the American researchers trained 28 rats to obtain fatty food for themselves with a lever which, when pressed, turned on a light and made a sound before dispensing a high-fat pellet. After the training period, the scientists tested how many times the rats would press the lever just to get the light and sound indication.
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The researchers then divided the rats into two groups : one was subjected to a high intensity treadmill running regimen and the other had no additional exercise outside of his usual activity. During the 30 days that the experiment lasted, the two groups of rats did not have access to the high-fat pellets. At the end of this period, the researchers gave the rats back access to the levers that dispensed the pellets, but this time when they pressed the levers, they only gave the light and sound cues.
As a result, the non-exercised animals pressed the levers significantly more often than the exercised rats, indicating that exercise reduced appetite for the pellets. The goal was to assess the psychic resistance of rats to the temptation to consume their fat-rich pelletsa phenomenon scientifically called “incubation of envy”.
Mentally beneficial to control cravings
Scientists therefore deduce that running on the carpet reduced the rodents’ appetite for fat. “Regular exercise could be beneficial not only physically for weight loss, but also mentally for master the harmful eating habits for health“, say the American researchers.
“A very important part of sticking to a diet is having some mental power — the ability to say ‘no, I might want this, but I’m going to abstain’,” Travis said. Brown, a physiology and neuroscience researcher at Washington State University. According to the lead author of the study, the sport could therefore be mentally beneficial for “taming unhealthy food cravings”too fatty, sweet or salty.