Watching your weight

Eating a healthy balanced diet and exercising more are important for a healthier lifestyle and maintaining a healthy weight. It’s a question of striking the right balance. With increasing numbers of the population being overweight or obese it is crucial that consumers get the right information about how to eat a balanced diet and become more physically active. Soya products can be integrated into an everyday healthy balanced diet. Recent publications underline the role of soya in weight loss.

Emerging evidence from trials suggests that high-soya protein diets increase short-term weight loss and improve blood lipids. A possible mechanism for weight loss with a high protein diet can be an increased satiety, a subsequent decrease in energy intake and carbohydrate replacement in the diet. Increased protein intake can enhance the satiating effect through circulating leptin in the central nervous system. In fact, proteins are more satiating than carbohydrates, which are more satiating than fat.

A higher thermogenesis is also a possible explanation. This could be linked to the fact that the body cannot store protein. So it needs to be immediately metabolically processed, not the case for carbohydrates and fat. A study of Anderson shows that meal replacers based on soya protein or cow’s milk protein, as part of a low energy diet, have the same effect on weight loss.

But not all types of protein have the same beneficial effect on the body. Soya protein is known to lower the blood cholesterol level. The FDA –US and JHCI –UK officially approved that “diets low in saturated fat and cholesterol that include 25 grams of soya protein a day may reduce the risk of heart disease” because soya protein can lower the blood cholesterol levels.

It is important that people are aware of the cholesterol lowering benefits soya can offer.