'Paleo' diet may not be so good at suppressing appetite

A new research suggests that the trendy "paleo" diet a plant-based diet inspired by the idea that human ancestors mainly consumed roughage may not be so good at suppressing appetite.

In the study, researchers looked at gut bacteria taken from people and from primates called gelada baboons, and found that bacteria fed with predigested grass produced a smaller amount of compounds called short-chain fatty acids, which trigger the production of appetite-reducing gut hormones, compared with the bacteria fed with predigested potatoes.

Study author Timothy Barraclough, a professor of evolutionary biology at Imperial College London said that they didn't find any suggestion that people should start eating grass and that doing so would help control their appetite, Fox News reported.

Moreover, the findings do not support the idea that weight gain results from the mismatch between the foods people tend to eat these days and what humans' ancestors used to eat, the researchers said.

According to paleontological evidence, the diet of early hominins included considerably more plants than the contemporary human diet, the researchers wrote in the study.

But in the study, "it was really the potato diet that was leading to the production of more of these [appetite-suppressing] compounds and [had] a bigger effect on the hormone pathways than the grass," Barraclough said.