Just One Fat Food Meal

Filed in archive Weight on April 25, 2007

You've watched your diet all week. You've added extra fruit and vegetables, whole grain and dairy. What the heck. It can't hurt to visit your favorite fast food restaurant. After all, it's just one meal.

Surprise! That one meal, according to ArcaMax Health and Fitness, does have an impact on your health, and in ways that might surprise you:

When a single, high-fat meal can make you more reactive to stress, it's cause for concern because it suggests a new and damaging way that a high-fat diet affects cardiovascular function, according to Dr. Tavis Campbell, author of the study.

My Health Blog adds:

Researchers fed people either a high fat or a low fat meal with equal calories. Then they subjected them to a stressor a couple of hours later - like math problems, public speaking or sticking their hand in ice water. People that ate the high fat meal had higher blood pressure after the stress than those that at the low-fat meal.

So, as well as heartburn, bloating, weight gain, and all the other evils found in fast food. now we can add stress - and from just one meal.