The abuse of fast food intake, together with other unhealthy habits such as the lack of physical exercise, is linked to the development of health problems such as obesity or type 2 diabetes.
There is a great lack of knowledge about the relationship between the continuous intake of fast food and the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (also known as hepatic steatosis). It is a potentially fatal condition caused by the accumulation of fat in the liver and which can lead, in more advanced stages, to cirrhosis and liver cancer. In countries like the United States, it is already the leading cause of liver transplantation.
According to the results of a recent study published in the scientific journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, people with obesity or diabetes who consume 20% or more of their daily calories in fast food have very high levels of fat in the liver compared to those who They consume less or no amount of fast food. The general population also presents increases in liver fat when basing a fifth or more of their diet on that type of food, although in this case the increase is more moderate.
“Healthy livers contain per se a small amount of fat, which as a rule represents less than 5%. We know that even a moderate increase in those levels could lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. We were especially surprised by the severe increase in liver fat in people with obesity or diabetes,” explains hepatologist Ani Kardashian, from the University of Southern California. “This is probably due to the fact that these health conditions cause a greater susceptibility to the accumulation of fat in the liver,” adds Kardashian, lead author of the study. She believes that the findings are “particularly alarming” in a context like the current one, in which fast food consumption has increased considerably in the last 50 years, regardless of socioeconomic level.
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