Animal study: weight loss a cinch with apple pulp

When apple juice is produced on an industrial scale apple pulp is left over. Right now most of this goes into animal feed, along with other waste products from the agro-food chain, but perhaps this will change soon. If you agree with the results of the animal study that researchers at the Korean Food One Tech Corporation are about to publish in the Journal of Medicinal Food, apple pulp is an excellent slimming aid.

When apple juice is produced on an industrial scale apple pulp is left over. Right now most of this goes into animal feed, along with other waste products from the agro-food chain, but perhaps this will change soon. If you agree with the results of the animal study that researchers at the Korean Food One Tech Corporation are about to publish in the Journal of Medicinal Food, apple pulp is an excellent slimming aid.

Apple pulp is an excellent source of phenols. The composition of the stuff varies according to the variety of apple and the production process they have undergone. The table below comes from a publication by Serbian food technologists. [Food Chemistry 2008, 109(2):340-347.]

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2

The apple pulp that the Koreans used consisted of 1.539 g phenols per 100 g. That’s a lot. Super foods like blueberries and cherries contain 0.671 and 0.430 g polyphenols per 100g respectively.

The Koreans were interested to know whether the addition of apple pulp to the diet would have health enhancing effects, so they put freeze-dried pulp in rats’ food. The pulp consisted of 20.1 percent water, 74.3 percent carbohydrates and 11 percent fibre. Each 100 g of the rats’ food contained 10 g pulp.

A second control group received the calorie-rich food only for the same period [HFD]. One experimental group was given food containing a concentrate made from apple juice [AC] from week five; the other experimental group was given food containing apple pulp [AP]. We’ll ignore the AC group from now on.

The apple pulp inhibited the rats’ weight increase. At the end of the experiment the rats in the apple pulp group actually weighed the same as the rats in the ND group.

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The tables above give an indication of how apple pulp causes weight loss. The rats started to eat less and the feed efficiency ratio [FER] went down. This was to a large extent because the rats excreted more fat in their faeces as a result of the apple pulp.

Despite their calorie-rich diet, the apple pulp supplement meant that the rats only had the same amount of fat tissue as the rats that had had a normal diet at the end of the experiment.

5

The Koreans suggest that more research should be done on how apple pulp enhances weight loss. We suspect that phenols from apples not only reduce fat uptake – which is no doubt due to the inhibition of lipase enzymes – but also boost metabolism and improve the body’s fat burning capacity.

Loss of body weight and fat and improved lipid profiles in obese rats fed apple pomace or apple juice concentrate.
Cho KD, Han CK, Lee BH.

Source

1 Food Policy & Technology Research Institute, Food One Tech Co., Ltd. , Seoul, Korea.

Abstract

Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of apple pomace (AP) and apple juice concentrate (AC) supplementation on body weight and fat loss as well as lipid metabolism in obese rats fed a high-fat diet. Diet-induced obese rats were assigned to three groups (n=8 for each group): high fat diet (HFD) control, HFD containing 10% (w/w) AP, and HFD containing 10% (w/w) AC. There was also a normal diet group (n=8). After 5 weeks, body weight gain, adipose tissue weight, serum and hepatic lipid profiles, liver morphology, and adipocyte size were measured. Body weight gain, white adipose tissue (WAT) weight, serum total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations, epididymal adipocyte size, and lesion scores were significantly lower and serum high-density lipoprotein cholesterol concentration and brown adipose tissue weights were significantly higher in the AP and AC groups compared with the HFD group. In addition, atherogenic indices in the AP and AC groups were significantly lower than in the HFD group. These results indicate that supplementing apple products such as AP and AC may help suppress body weight and WAT gain, as well as improve lipid profiles in diet-induced obese rats.

PMID: 23909905 [PubMed – in process] PMCID: PMC3778949

Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23909905

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