Men shed more weight by exercises than women, a study confirms

Men and women, both like to look their best. And for that, they spend hours at gym to burn their calories. But a recent study might break your heart. It says that women are benefitted lesser than men from work outs. The healthcare practitioners usually ask the patient to eat a prescribed diet and do exercise to lose weight. But these exercises seem to be gender biased as per the new report. They are not equally effective in men and women, according to a new research conducted by the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus

The study was conducted on rats, in which researcher Rebecca Foright fed both male and female rats a high fat diet and then made half of them to run on a treadmill. After 10 total weeks, there was a remarkable sex difference in response to the exercise training. Male rats who worked out ate less food and gained less weight in contrary to sedentary males. 

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Exercising female rats did not reduce their food intake. At the end of the study, they weighed the same as sedentary females. When this study was repeated in males fed a low fat diet, the research team found that the impact of exercise on body weight was evident even sooner than in the high fat diet fed male rats.

These findings will be presented this week at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behaviour, the leading scientific society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behaviour.Other researchers have reported that a single bout of exercise leads to an increase in interleukin-6 (IL-6) in the hypothalamus of male rodents. The hypothalamus is a brain area playing a key role in monitoring signals from the body to properly regulate feeing behaviour. IL-6 is produced by muscle cells during acute bouts of strenuous exercise and it may also be produced in the brain with exercise. Studies have shown that IL-6 could mediate the beneficial effects of exercise on body weight regulation, by enhancing the brain's response to hormones that suppress food intake.

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Surprisingly, this story of IL-6 and acute exercise does not readily translate to the exercise-trained condition. When researchers from the University of Colorado measured IL-6 in their studies, they found that exercise-trained male rats had decreased hypothalamic IL-6, while the exercised females had increased IL-6.

They believe that chronic exercise, unlike a single bout of exercise, may be imparting the sex specific differences in body weight control through differential effects on hypothalamic inflammation, rather than by acutely altering local concentrations of IL-6.Despite an increased prevalence of obesity in women and physiological differences between males and females in the hormonal signals and brain processes that influence appetite, the vast majority of mechanistic studies on obesity and treatment are performed in male animals.

Foright said, "I hope that this research inspires other investigators to examine a female-specific response in their animal models. It is unacceptable to simply assume that females will respond to interventions in the same manner as males."

(With ANI Inputs) 

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