Nutrition and disease
University of Calgary nutrition researcher Dr. Raylene Reimer studies the role of diet in heart disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. One of her interests is the link between obesity and prebiotic fibre, a unique dietary fibre that increases the number of healthy bacteria living in the gut. "Research has shown that increasing these bacteria can improve the overall health of your gut and maybe your immune system," says Dr. Reimer. "So we were interested in looking at prebiotic fibre for some of its other properties: perhaps its ability to help people reduce their food intake and ultimately to help them with weight loss." Some initial studies showed that the fibre had good results in rats: Those that received the fibre significantly reduced their food intake, and their body-fat percentage decreased. Dr. Reimer has just completed a three-month study of the fibre in overweight and obese humans, and the initial findings look promising.
Another branch of her studies involves dairy proteins. Evidence from epidemiological studies has suggested that the more dairy products an individual consumes, the lower their weight and body-fat percentage. Dr. Reimer has examined the effect of a diet high in dairy protein on obese rats, with some dramatic effects. Rats on skim milk diets gained less weight than those on regular diets. Dr. Reimer is currently seeking ethics approval for a human study to follow up on these results. She now wants to identify the mechanism by which skim milk reduces weight gain.
The area of research that Dr. Reimer finds most intriguing is early dietary programming: the idea that maternal diet, or the diet an infant receives, can permanently program the child's genes for increased or decreased risk for heart disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. To study this phenomenon, Dr. Reimer examines the effects of controlled standard diets, high-fibre diets, and high-protein diets on both pregnant rats and rat pups. Her most interesting finding came when she gave the rats high-fat, high-sugar diets as adults. The rats exposed to high-protein diets as pups had the most dramatic increases in body weight and body-fat percentage—the diets they had received when young seemed to have altered their metabolisms.
This type of early-programming research is especially hot right now, explains Dr. Reimer. "If we're ever going to get a handle on slowing down the obesity epidemic, we have to look at prevention as a strategy. And prevention may go even further back than we thought—to the first year of life, to what the mother eats during pregnancy, even to pre-conception."