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Here's a piece of good news for people who have had a gastric bypass – not only will you eat less, you may also start to eat more healthily.
The most common form of bariatric – anti-obesity – surgery is the "Roux-en-Y" gastric bypass, which involves stapling the stomach so a small pouch is made at the top, which is then connected directly to the small intestine. This bypasses most of the stomach and the duodenum so the patient feels full quicker.
The vertical-banded gastroplasty is an alternative technique which reduces the volume of the stomach without bypassing any part of the intestine, restricting how much the patient can eat at any one time.
After people undergo gastric bypass operations, it is not uncommon for them to report that their eating habits have changed. To investigate these claims, Carel le Roux and colleagues from Imperial College London asked 16 people who had undergone either type of bariatric surgery six years before to fill in a survey about their dietary preferences after the operation.
People who had had a gastric bypass reported eating a lower proportion of fat after surgery than those with a vertical-banded gastroplasty.
Low-fat rats
To find out why this was so, the team carried out either a gastric bypass or a sham operation on 26 rats.
They found the rats with the gastric bypass ate less and regained less weight after recovering from the surgery than the others. In just 10 days after the operation, the gastric bypass rats had, on average, increased the proportion of low-fat food in their diets by a factor of four.
In a separate experiment, researchers gave other post-operative rats sugar water while infusing corn oil directly into their stomachs. This meant that their digestive system encountered fat but the animals had not tasted it. The bypass rats learned to avoid the water nevertheless, but the sham-operated rats did not. This suggests that the preference for low-fat food may have been a result of the bypass rats finding it harder to digest high-fat food after the operation, rather than it somehow affecting their sense of taste.NewScientist
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