A research has found that drinking grapefruit juice when eating fatty food lowers the amount of weight put on by up to a fifth.
The findings also suggested that grapefruit could be as good as prescription drugs at keeping blood sugar levels under control – a key part of managing diabetes.
The experiments were conducted on mice – but researchers say the results justify studies on humans.
Professor Joseph Napoli, of the University of California, Berkeley, said: ‘We see all sorts of scams about nutrition. But these results, based on controlled experiments, warrant further study of the potential health-promoting properties of grapefruit juice.’
The researchers found that when the mice were fed fatty food for three months, those given grapefruit juice to drink gained up to 18 per cent less weight than those given water.
They also had lower blood sugar and insulin levels – despite eating the same number of calories and doing the same amount of exercise as the mice who drank water. In fact, grapefruit juice was as good at controlling insulin as the widely used diabetes drug Metformin, the journal PLOS ONE reports.
However, the fruit juice only had an effect on weight when the animals ate fatty food.
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