Diet Heavy In Red Meat Increases Appetite, Disease Risk

New findings published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation show that a diet heavy in red meat may not only increase overall appetite, but also risk of disease.

For the study, a team of researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center discovered that dietary iron intake, equivalent to heavy red meat consumption, suppresses leptin, a hormone that regulates appetite.

While iron is the one mineral that humans can excrete so more iron is consumed with greater likelihood that leptin levels drop, this can result in increased appetite with the potential to overeat as well.

In this study, researchers used an animal model in which they fed male mice high and low-normal ion diets for two months, followed by measuring the levels of iron in fat tissue. Researchers observed a 215 percent increase of iron in the mice fed a high iron diet compared to those fed the low normal diet. Furthermore, leptin in blood were 42 percent lower in mice on the high iron diet when compared to those on the low normal diet.

"We showed that the amount of food intake increased in animals that had high levels of dietary iron," Don McClain, senior author of the study, said in a statement. "In people, high iron, even in the high-normal range, has been implicated as a contributing factor to many diseases, including diabetes, fatty liver disease and Alzheimer's, so this is yet another reason not to eat so much red meat because the iron in red meat is more readily absorbed than iron from plants."

Researchers verified the study results through ferritin blood tests via a large number of human participants in a previous clinical study, measuring the amount of iron stored in the body.

Findings revealed that fat tissue responds to iron availability to adjust the expression of leptin--otherwise known as a major regulator of metabolism, appetite and energy expenditure.

"We don't know yet what optimal iron tissue level is, but we are hoping to do a large clinical trial to determine if decreasing iron levels has any effect on weight and diabetes risk," McClain said. "The better we understand how iron works in the body, the better chance we have of finding new pathways that may be targets for the prevention and treatment of diabetes and other diseases."

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