Good news! There may be a pill you could pop that would stop you putting on weight.
According to a paper published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Science, rats fed a diet to make them obese but supplemented with a derivative of resveratrol (pterostilbene) a phenolic compound found in, for instance, red grapes showed a reduction of lipogenesis in adipose tissue (i.e. less love handles) and increased fatty acid oxidation in liver.
I think supplements would be the way to go though, I just did a quick calculation and I work out that an average male would have to eat 288 kg of red grapes per day to have the equivalent dose of resveratrol used in this study. If you look at pterostilbene, the actual compound used in the study, it would appear you would have to eat even more than that.
There has been great interest in resveratrol over the last fews, as more papers are published with the potential health benefits of the compound. There have also been some negative reports, such as a recent one in the Journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism that found that resveratrol supplementation cancelled out some of the health benefits of exercise.
As is so often the case, this does not appear to be a simple story…
Click here to read the paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Science
Click here to read the paper from the Journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism.