Nutrition Quickie: Protein Snacks Shift Macro-Intake W/Out Risk of Overeating ✰ Fewer Dietary Restrictions From the Parents' Side Helps Kids Lose Weight ✰ Ricy Liver Cleanse

Regular snack: No relative increase in protein intake, but an absolute increase in energy intake; protein snack / shake: No increase in absolute energy intake, but increase in rel. protein intake.

I usually don't recommend snacking between the meals, but when it comes to nutritious science news snacks right from the "ahead of print" section of peer-reviewed scientific journals, I will make an exception.

In other words, if you are interested in what exactly makes protein supplements so valuable as an addition to your regular diet, if you want to know how you may help your kids lose weight by being less not more restrictive. And if that's nothing your are interested in, 'cause you ain't got kids, and still believe protein was bad for your bones (it's not!) you may want to take a parting look at evidence that rice cannot be that bad as some people make it.

Sounds good? Well, then I'd suggest you go ahead and "snack away" on today's SuppVersity Nutrition News Quickie... ah, I mean "Nutrition News Snack" ;-)

• Protein Supplements Shift Macro-Intake W/Out Risk of Overeating (Maillard. 2014) -- Scientist from the University of Otago in New Zealand have been able to show that the provision of extra-protein in form a high protein supplement (1034.5 kJ energy, 29.6 g protein, 8.7 g fat and 12.3 g CHO) to 18 healthy participants who took part in their randomized cross-over trial lead to a unique shift in the relative proportion of protein in the diet, but did not increase the absolute amount of total protein or energy consumed.
  
  This means, in contrast to the control treatment, in the course of which the subjects received a standard meal supplementation (1039 kJ energy, 9.9 g protein, 9.5 g fat, and 29.4 g CHO), the study participants compensated for the additional energy intake from the high protein meal. For the standard meal replacement, on the other hand, Maillard et al. observed an overall increase in food intake.
• Fewer Dietary Restrictions From the Parents' Side Helps Kids Lose Weight (Holland. 2014) -- If there is one subgroup of our society you can hardly blame for the ever increasing obesity rates, this would be the children.
  
  

  

  SuppVersity Suggested Read: "HIT the Cravings - Eat Less, Improve Your Health & Lose Weight: "Burning 350kcal" at >75% VO2-Max Improves Calorie Balance Doing it at 40% Just Makes You Hungry!" | more

  This notion would also be supported by the results of a recent study that's about to be published in one of the upcoming issues of the scientific journal Obesity. In the corresponding experiment, researchers from the Department of Psychology at the Washington University School of Medicine examine the associations between modifications in parent feeding practices, child diet, and child weight status.
  
  Interestingly, the scientists found that restrictive parent feeding practices and not the non-chalant "wtf eat whatever you want, kid" was not just the main predictor of childhood obesity, it was also the setscrew the scientists used to reduce the kids energy intake by teaching the parents to reduce children's energy intake without being overly restrictive.
• Ricy Liver Cleanses (Choi. 2014) -- It may not be in the OCD, but since google told me that it is a valid "scrabble word", I still used the the word "ricy" as a short form for "based on boiled rice". A "ricy liver cleanse" is thus nothing else but the reduction of hepatic fat accumulation researchers from the Division of Metabolism and Functionality Research at the Korea Food Research Institute observed, when they fed C57BL/6 mice with high fat diets that contained cooked rice as one of the major carbohydrate sources.
  
  As Choi et al. point out in the discussion of the results, these effects were mediated by the suppression of the "high fat"-induced increase in expression of lipogenic genes (including fatty acid synthase (FAS) and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPARγ)) and accompanied by reductions in endogenous cholesterol production.
  
  Based on epidemiologic evidence, we do yet have to be careful as far as overgeneralized suggestions such as "eat more rice" are concerned. Studies by Villegas et al. or Sun do after all suggest that the consumption of likewise cooked mushy Asian white rice is associated with an increase in diabetes risk (Villegas. 2007) and replacing the latter with brown or other low GI (e.g. basmati) rice could reduce the diabetes risk of the average American rice-eater by 16% (Sun. 2010)

Suggested Read: "The Starch Satiety Shootout: Potatoes, Baked or Mashed, Pasta, Brown Rice or Even White Bread? What's the Best After a 12h Fast?" | read more

What do these studies teach us? The Maillard study is another piece to the puzzle that explains the high efficiency of high protein intake for weight loss. If we also take into account what Holland et al. found observed in their study, a viable strategy by the means of which parents could help their kids lose weight would thus be to offer them protein supplements instead of milk shakes and see what will happen instead of telling them that they will never drink another extra-sweet vanilla-cream milk shake again. Whether it really is a wise idea to actually increase your rice consumption as a means to protect yourself against non-alcoholic fatty liver disease remains questionable - irrespective of the myriad of healthy phenols in non-polished rice (Zhou. 2004), by the way.

Reference: 

• Choi et al. "Cooked rice inhibits hepatic fat accumulation by regulating lipid metabolism-related gene expression in mice fed a high-fat diet." J Med Food 17:1 (2014): 36-42. 
• Holland et al. "Modifications in parent feeding practices and child diet during family-based behavioral treatment improve child zBMI." Obesity (silver spring). 2014 [epub ahead of print]
• Maillard et al. "Protein Supplements-Do They Alter Dietary Intakes?" Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab (2014) [epub ahead of print]
• Villegas, Raquel, et al. "Prospective study of dietary carbohydrates, glycemic index, glycemic load, and incidence of type 2 diabetes mellitus in middle-aged Chinese women." Archives of Internal Medicine 167.21 (2007): 2310.
• Zhou, Zhongkai, et al. "The distribution of phenolic acids in rice." Food Chemistry 87.3 (2004): 401-406.