Men, take note: A sedentary lifestyle may lead you to binge on high-fat food
A study has recently found that males with a sedentary lifestyle preferred a high-fat diet over other diets. The results showed that sedentary male rats preferred the high-fat diet over the other diets. “Our team wanted to make every effort to study female perspectives on how exercise affects diet, because most other studies neglect females,” said a study author Jenna Lee from University of Missouri-Columbia.
“We wanted to take a look at what drives diet preference and if environmental factors, such as physical activity, play a role in how males and females eat,” Lee added. The team divided male and female rats into two groups — a sedentary group and one that had access to a running wheel. Both groups ate the same food.
After a week, Lee replaced the standard diet with three optional diets: high-fat (similar to cookie dough), high-sucrose (three times more sucrose than the other two diets), and a high-corn starch diet. Each of the diets were matched on proteins and the rats had continuous access to all three diets for four weeks.