Hey Dietitians, are you competing with Noom? Noom works well for patients because their health coaches opens up a dialogue about how they think and feel about the food their eating. And clients lose weight with Noom because the coaches help them to separate out their emotion from their food choices. But is their more to weight loss than emotional eating? What happened to the effect that the food choices have on the body’s metabolism. This is where we come in as dietitians. We understand how food changes the metabolism, sometimes for the better and sometimes, for the worse. So here is some information that you can use to convince your clients that there is more to weight loss and weight management. Functional foods have long been used in age-old folklore, and it is now that scientific evidence shows the proof. One such functional food, that helps with weight loss, is called bitter melon. This weird looking fruit, found in Korean and Thai supermarkets, got its name from how it tastes. Yes that’s right, bitter. Really bitter. Some also call it “bitter gourd”. But if you can get beyond the taste, either through supplements, or a recipe from a grandmother’s cookbook, the intake has many health benefits. One such benefit is weight loss. The other is diabetes! But we’ll focus on weight loss for now. The research shows that bitter melon seed oil helps with weight loss.
Bitter melon seed oil indicates to have the ability to help an obese individual lose weight. The bitter melon seed oil showed to induce thermogenesis, lipolysis and stop fat synthesis as well as activated the synthesis of white adipose tissue (WAT). According to Chen, Chen and Yang (2012), a high fat diet with butter was given to mice for ten weeks to make them obese. This group of mice was then given a diet with high fat and bitter melon seed oil (BMSO) for ten weeks. (Chen, Chen and Yang, 2012) The BMSO causes a decrease in appetite due to increased production of leptin and increase sensitivity of leptin in the central nervous system.
The anti-obesity effect of BMSO in white adipose tissue (WAT) is also associated with the increased production of leptin in the WAT inducing the thermogenesis and lipolysis. The BMSO is shown to have anti-obesity effects while also inducing a lipophylic effect of adipose tissue with subsequent macrophages with an anti-inflammatory effect. (Chen, Chen, & Yang, 2012). So next time, you talk to your clients about weight loss, let them know that emotional eating is one part of it. But as only one piece of the puzzle, metabolism is the other. And then teach them that the functional food called bitter melon can help! And if you’d like to read the article from Journal of Nutrition, here you go.
