If you’re going to eat a high fat meal you should consider some high intensity exercise first.
That was the findings of a paper published ahead of print of the website of the American Journal of Physiology this week.
The researchers wanted to see the effect of medium and high intensity exercise before eating a meal high in fat and so recruited 20 adolescents for the job. They were split into 3 groups, 2 of which were the high intensity and medium intensity exercise groups, the third being a control.
The macrovascular and microvascular endothelial function were measured along with antioxidant status and triglyceride levels of the blood (moderate exercise has previously been reported to decrease triglyceride levels).
They found that high intensity exercise had a significantly larger effect on macrovascular and microvascular endothelial function compared to the control but also compared to the medium intensity exercise. There were no significant differences in antioxidant status and triglyceride levels between the groups.
So if you’re going to exercise before indulging in a high fat meal, you may want to crank it up a notch.