Fast Food Diet? Drink Grapefruit Juice

Worried about all the super-fatty meals you've been eating these days? Afraid of gaining some poundage or worse, diabetes because of it? Now researchers are saying that regularly drinking grapefruit juice can help mitigate the adverse consequences of a high-fat diet.

That's at least according to a study recently published in the journal PLOS ONE, which details how pure grapefruit juice diluted with water helped control weight gain and even insulin resistance in mice.

"There are many active compounds in grapefruit juice, and we don't always understand how all those compounds work," explained Andreas Stahl, who led the research with Joseph Napoli of UC Berkeley.

The researchers said in a recent release that they were inspired to investigate the metabolic effects of grapefruit juice because the fruit has long been called a fat-burner, with little concrete evidence.

"Relatively few human studies have examined the effects of grapefruit or grapefruit juice consumption per se on metabolism in well-controlled experiments, and these have produced intriguing but contradictory results," the authors said.

To rectify this, they randomly divided mice into six groups, including a control group that drank only water. The five remaining groups of mice drinking grapefruit juice got a mixture diluted with water at different concentrations. They then were put on high-fat diets for extended periods of time.

Amazingly, by the end of the study, the researchers found that the grapefruit juice groups gained up to 18 percent less weight than the water group. Unexpectedly, the grapefruit juice also seemed to have been tied to a 13-17 percent reduction in blood glucose levels and a three-fold reduction in insulin levels.

"I was surprised by the findings," said Stahl. "We even re-checked the calibration of our glucose sensors, and we got the same results over and over again."

"We see all sorts of scams about nutrition," Napoli added. "But these results, based on controlled experiments, warrant further study of the potential health-promoting properties of grapefruit juice."