Temple Study: Men Ate 6,000 Calories a Day and Didn’t Get Out of Bed for a Week

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Nope, you didn’t read that headline wrong. For a new study out of Temple University, six male volunteers willingly (and, I’m assuming, happily) consumed 6,000 calories of pizza and burgers every day for one week without getting out of bed the entire time. The goal was to learn about the cause of diabetes by seeing what happens when otherwise healthy individuals consume 2.5 times more calories than they should without moving their bodies to burn it off.

Any guesses as to what happened?  

At the end of the week, the volunteers gained an average of more than 7.5 pounds a piece. They also developed insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes, after just two days on their junk-food-and-no-exercise diet. Temple researchers were curious to find out why.

Explains Tech Insider:

After analyzing the men’s blood and urine, the team concluded that the initial cause of insulin resistance in the men’s fat tissues was not due to increased fatty acids, inflammation, or cellular stress, but was in fact from oxidative stress, the process that can damage cells’ lipids, proteins, and DNA.

The findings are intriguing, experts say, because prior to this, no one knew exactly what triggered the chain reaction that leads to insulin resistance and, eventually, Type 2 diabetes. Of course, the results are preliminary and the study was small — it only looked at six volunteers, all male, all middle age — but the scientific community is hailing it as an important first step.

As for those volunteers? The prediabetes shouldn’t stick once they return to their normal diets and lifestyles, but they’ll have some work ahead of them to shed those extra 7.5 pounds. We have a few suggestions that could help.

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