By Frances Cook
Stomach stapling is known for reducing how much people eat, but now it’s said the procedure also makes you favour healthy foods.
Research recently released by Imperial College London says a gastric bypass changes eating habits by making fat digestion difficult, and creates hormone changes which lead to taste preferences for low fat foods.
Nikki Talacek, a New Zealand registered dietician who was not involved with the research, says the hormone changes the research found are unsurprising.
Many hormones are produced in the stomach, and their levels are changed by the surgical alterations.
“Some people want to keep eating, no matter how much they eat, and that’s driven by hormones,” Ms Talacek says.
“They wake up from surgery, and it’s like a switch has been turned off in their brain.”
New Zealand obesity surgeon Michael Booth says even if a person with a gastric bypass tried eating fatty food, it could make them feel sick.
“Some patients are very sensitive to oily or fatty foods after surgery,” Mr Booth says
“It’s pretty common for patients to become disinterested in food in general, when before they were very much driven by food.”
The drastic change in stomach size does have some complications, and patients are expected to follow a strict diet and take vitamins at twice the normal dose for the rest of their lives, Mr Booth says.
If they do not, patients face serious health problems brought about by deficiencies in fat soluble vitamins A, D, K and E, Iron and B12.
The research was performed through several different experiments lead by Dr Carel le Roux, head of the clinical obesity program at the Imperial Weight Centre.
Two experiments found rats with a gastric bypass quadrupled the proportion of low fat food in their diet, even when taste was not a factor, compared to rats who had a sham operation.
Another experiment found that hormones promoting a feeling of fullness, such as glucagon-like peptide-1 and peptide YY, were produced in rats with a gastric bypass.
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