These foods would help people trying to maintain their weight, burn more fat and eat more calories without gaining weight, according to a new research. The study, carried out with funds from the National Dairy Council of the United States and published in the journal Nutrition & Metabolism, did not prove that the consumption of the three daily servings of recommended dairy products would help to not recover the lost weight, but it did reveal that they could consume more calories without getting fat.
Being able to consume more calories would make it easier for people to follow a maintenance diet, the team led by Dr. Michael B. Zemel of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville suggested.
Zemel has received subsidies from the council and has patents on the use of calcium in the control of body weight. Previous studies have shown in supercharged rats that diets rich in calcium reduce the risk of regaining lost weight and decrease fat accumulation, while helping to burn fat and lose weight during a restricted diet period.
Some studies on humans also showed that calcium promotes fat loss, perhaps by making it impossible for the body to retain fat cells.
However, no study on humans had analyzed whether calcium and dairy help maintain weight.
To investigate, the team reduced the amount of calories ingested by 338 obese men and women for three months. Participants who managed to lose 10 percent of their weight or 10 kilograms would then randomly eat less than a daily serving of dairy or more than three servings daily for the next six months.
At that maintenance stage, weight and body composition were similar in both groups. But the participants with high milk consumption ate 9 percent less calories than at the beginning of the study, unlike the 22 percent less calories consumed by the group with low intake of dairy products.
"That suggests that diets with recommended daily levels of dairy foods would have more energy content (calories) with the same effects on weight and body fat as reduced diets in dairy," the researchers wrote.
The group that consumed the recommended amount of dairy also had a reduction in blood levels of calcitriol, the active form of vitamin D, which inhibits the division and oxidation of fat cells.
The authors concluded that people who do not want to recover lost weight can add dairy products to their diet without risk of gaining weight.
