Study: Refined grains contribute to belly fat

Scientists say white bread and other refined grains seem to go to the gut and hang out as belly fat.

Many Americans are like a loaf of bread — soft, with one side round. And some researchers believe their choice of bread may be part of the reason.

The scientists say white bread and other refined grains seem to go to the gut and hang out as belly fat.

“Waist circumference was very much associated with this high-refined grains pattern,” said Katherine Tucker, an associate professor of nutritional epidemiology at Tufts University in Boston. She and her colleagues are studying what happens to the bodies of people who eat lots of refined bread.

The scientists say white bread and other refined grains seem to go to the gut and hang out as belly fat.

Refined vs. whole grains
The researchers have been following the eating habits of a group of healthy, largely middle-aged people in Baltimore. They focused on 459 people with a variety of eating habits, including some who preferred refined grains and others who preferred fiber such as whole grains, fruits and vegetables.

For those who are not food scientists, refining removes the fibrous bran and oil-rich germ, leaving the sweeter endosperm, the whitish-colored meat of the kernel.

The Tufts researchers say that, for some reason, calories from refined grains preferred to settle at the waistline. The belt size of the white bread group expanded about one-half inch a year, which probably put some of the research subjects into a larger size of pants over the three years they were followed, Tucker said. At the end, the white bread group had three times the fiber group’s gain at the gut.

It’s not surprising that the waists of refined-grain eaters expanded, said Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital in Boston. Ludwig was not connected to the Tufts study, but his research had found something similar in a look at younger adults around the nation. One of the factors he checked was the waist-to-hip ratio — whether people’s torsos were more tapered or more round. People who ate less fiber were more round.

Read more...