‘Cure’ asthma AND lose weight on a low calorie diet, experts say

LOW-CALORIE diets may help prevent asthma symptoms, scientists claim.

It doesn't matter how much fat or sugar you eat, they say, as long as you're consuming less energy overall.

In a new study, they've found that obesity resulting from high-calorie diets can lead to asthma symptoms in animals as a result of lung inflammation.

Scientists say that their results further prove a link between obesity, inflammation and asthma.

But they also found in their study that an anti-inflammatory drug helped to ease the asthma symptoms in mice, and that's led them conclude that it might be worth treating obese people who have breathing difficulties with a similar drug.

"Previous studies suggested that the high fat or high sugar content in diets that led to obesity promoted inflammation and caused asthma," said Dr Vsevolod Polotsky, professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and senior author of the study.

They found that the airwaves of the high-cal, non-restricted diet mice restricted at least 6.3 times more than the baseline.

The next stage of the study involved injecting one group of mice with a drug called anakinra every day during the last two weeks to block the activity of an inflammatory protein.

Anakinra tends to be used to treat rheumatoid arthritis because of its anti-inflammatory properties.

When the obese mice were tested again after taking this drug, their airways only constricted 2.9 times more than the baseline - 5.1 times lower than the obese mice who had not been given it.

Asthma is a common chronic lung disease in which inflammation causes narrowing of airways, leading to wheezing, coughing, shortness of breath and chest tightness.

We've known for years that obese people are more likely than slimmer people to develop certain kinds of asthma or have asthma symptoms increase.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 38.8 per cent of adults with asthma are obese, much higher than the obesity rate in adults without asthma, which stands at 26.8 per cent.

Of course, that could be because having asthma stops some people from being active...or it could be that being inactive and overweight puts pressure on the body which prompts an asthmatic response.

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