Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Obesity is a public health problem, associated with several non-communicable diseases, lower psychosocial well-being and elevated risk of death. Managing obesity with Orlistat (a lipase inhibitor) has shown gastrointestinal side effects. Seaweed and its extract alginate, have shown lipase inhibition, which could help with weight loss. Therefore, adding alginate or seaweed into a cheese could decrease dietary lipids digestion and absorption and therefore reducing body weight.

Objectives: The aims were; firstly, assess the acceptability, palatability, and ease of incorporation chesses containing seaweed and alginate into an habitual diet, secondly to examine their effect on gastrointestinal wellbeing functions.

Design: Thirty-seven healthy participants completed the study (21 females), filled in daily food intake and daily and a weekly GI wellbeing questionnaire during 4 weeks of intervention by consumed their normal habitual diet for one week, they consumed alginate cheese for one week, consumed seaweed cheese for one week, and consumed control cheese for one week.

Results: There was no statistically significant difference between the baseline food consumed and the dietary food intake (calories, carbohydrate, fat, and protein) during consuming the alginate, seaweed, and control cheeses. There was no significant change to the GI wellbeing (the participants feeling of alert, fullness, bloatedness, flatulent, irritable) during consuming all the study cheeses. There was no significant correlation between the total macronutrients consumed during the study for any of the cheeses and the wellbeing questions asked of participants at the end of each day.

Conclusion: We can conclude that alginate and seaweed were acceptable and eating theses cheeses had no impact on the health of GI wellbeing.

Keywords: Alginate, pancreatic lipase, obesity, gastrointestinal (GI).